Re: [PHP-DEV] Making parse_ini_*() aware of types

On Sat, Aug 30, 2014 at 4:36 PM, Tjerk Meesters
<[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi internals,
>
> I was going through the bug list and found this report:
>
> https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=38409
>
> It discusses the fact that `parse_ini_file()` and `parse_ini_string()` throw away type information; for instance, the flag “on” doesn’t translate into a bool(true) but string(“1”).
>
> The report has had 21 votes and an average score of 4.3 +- 0.7, so it seems to have some traction with users.
>
>
> Simply changing this behaviour would cause BC, so I’ve found a way in which this can be solved with a separate scanner mode; e.g.:
>
> $data = parse_ini_file(‘/path/to/file’, true, INI_SCANNER_TYPED);
>
> A patch for the lexer can be found here, together with a simple test case:
>
> https://github.com/datibbaw/php-src/compare/php:master...datibbaw:ini-scanner-plus
>
> It currently distinguishes between booleans, numbers and NULL (it was mentioned in the ticket by someone else, not entirely sure of its usefulness, though). I haven’t benchmarked it, but the impact on performance should be quite minimal.
>
> Thoughts?


+1 for me, this seems obvious.

Julien