[PHP-BUG] Req #70378 [NEW]: keyval (=effective value as array key) to complement strval/intval

From:             rn at alpha9marketing dot com
Operating system: 
PHP version:      Irrelevant
Package:          PHP Language Specification
Bug Type:         Feature/Change Request
Bug description:keyval (=effective value as array key) to complement strval/intval

Description:
------------
PHP offers strval, intval, floatval, doubleval to manually coerce values
to desired types. This eases strict comparisons with the === operator
within a desired type domain.

One omission is that one can not trivially cast a value as it would be
(internally) when that value is used as an array key.

PHP apparently casts booleans to integers when they are used as array
keys. A subset of numeric strings (minus hex / octal literal strings,
potentially others) is cast to integers, as are floats (truncated
towards zero).

NULL is converted to an empty string.

There is currently no built-in function that exposes this special type
coersion used for array keys to the programmer, though one would have to
assume it exists somewhere in the PHP code and exposing it would require
only an external interface without (much) additional logic.


Expected result:
----------------
php > var_dump(keyval(NULL));
string(0) ""
php > var_dump(keyval(false));
int(0)
php > var_dump(keyval(true));
int(1)
php > var_dump(keyval(-1.734));
int(-1)
php > var_dump(keyval(1.734));
int(1)
php > var_dump(keyval("12"));
int(12)
php > var_dump(keyval("0xA"));
string(3) "0xA"
php > var_dump(keyval("017"));
string(3) "017"



-- 
Edit bug report at https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=70378&edit=1
-- 
Try a snapshot (PHP 5.4):   https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=70378&r=trysnapshot54
Try a snapshot (PHP 5.5):   https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=70378&r=trysnapshot55
Try a snapshot (trunk):     https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=70378&r=trysnapshottrunk
Fixed in SVN:               https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=70378&r=fixed
Fixed in release:           https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=70378&r=alreadyfixed
Need backtrace:             https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=70378&r=needtrace
Need Reproduce Script:      https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=70378&r=needscript
Try newer version:          https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=70378&r=oldversion
Not developer issue:        https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=70378&r=support
Expected behavior:          https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=70378&r=notwrong
Not enough info:            https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=70378&r=notenoughinfo
Submitted twice:            https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=70378&r=submittedtwice
register_globals:           https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=70378&r=globals
PHP 4 support discontinued: https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=70378&r=php4
Daylight Savings:           https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=70378&r=dst
IIS Stability:              https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=70378&r=isapi
Install GNU Sed:            https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=70378&r=gnused
Floating point limitations: https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=70378&r=float
No Zend Extensions:         https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=70378&r=nozend
MySQL Configuration Error:  https://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=70378&r=mysqlcfg