MySQL result values - why always strings?

greenie2600

I'm kind of anal about variable type, and it annoys me that PHP's MySQL functions return all result values as strings, regardless of column type.

What's the rationale behind this? When MySQL returns a field containing an integer, why wouldn't PHP expose it as an integer? I know PHP is a loosely typed language, but that's no excuse for pretending that type doesn't exist.

Even the mysqli_*() functions are like this. Is this one of those things like gpc_magic_quotes—"it seemed like a good idea at the time"?

I'm currently tweaking my home-brew database library to behave more intuitively. If I didn't spend so much time messing around with plumbing, I might get some actual work done 🙂

jeremyphphaven

so what's the actual problem?

NogDog

For one thing: I'm not really sure if this is a PHP limitation or a MySQL interface limitation. In either case, it seems a fairly moot point since PHP is a loosely typed language.

jeremyphphaven

NogDog wrote:
For one thing: I'm not really sure if this is a PHP limitation or a MySQL interface limitation. In either case, it seems a fairly moot point since PHP is a loosely typed language.

exactly... and to go one step further, if you're really a nut about making sure you're types are controlled how you want them, you can do so.

But you're talking to people whom love php, I don't know about anyone else, but I have a .net background (still use it for silverlight integration) and can feel your pain, but that's one of many reason I love using a scripting language, and I love php so much because it's more structured than perl or others.

laserlight

I think that it is indeed a limitation of the MySQL extension. Consider that we can specify the type with stmt->bind_param() for the MySQLi or use PDOStatement->bindColumn() with PDO:😛ARAM_INT for the PDO extension.