Upcasting Failure: PHP and String Insanity

One of the most awesome bugs to bite me in PHP is how it handles comparisons. For any two strings, everything's fine. For any two ints, the comparison is what you expect. But, what happens when you compare a string to an int?

<?php
if ('astring' == 0) {
        echo 'insane';
}

This happly little script will print the fact that PHP is, in a word, insane. Clearly, 0 and 'astring' are not the same thing; not even close. 'astring' isn't even falsy.

What's happening here is that PHP is casting both to an integer, instead of to a string. And the rules in PHP say that, since string 'astring' has no leading numerals, it's converted to the number 0. Clearly not what anyone coming from a strongly typed language would expect. The "correct" way is, easily enough, to use === instead of ==.

I thought the insanity stopped there, but then I ran into another gem. We have a select box in one app that allows the user to choose hours, days, weeks, and months:

<select>
    <option value="1/24">Hourly</option>
    <option value="1">Daily</option>
    <option value="7">Weekly</option>
    <option value="31">Monthly</option>
</select>

In the app, we handled this with a switch. It worked beautifully until the time came to add in support for the 'Hourly' option. Javascript kept anyone from actually selecting 'Hourly' until we were done with the backend to support it, but the client wanted to see where the option would be in the final interface.

<?php

switch ($time) {
    case 31:
        // monthly processing
        break;

    case 7:
        // weekly processing
        break;

    case 1: default:
        // daily processing
        break;

    case '1/24':
        // @TODO: add support for this
        break;
}

PHP compares the case labels using == logic. This means everything was coming up daily instead of hourly. Instead, it's better to just leave everything in the switch as a string. Since $input comes in through the $_POST vars, it's a string regardless, and will compare correctly.

But really, why does 0 == 'astring' in the first place, PHP?

:wq