Why is $false -eq “” true?

Question

The following code segments output true:

$x = ($false -eq \"\") 
Write-Host $x

$x = ($false -eq 0) 
Write-Host $x

Since $false and \"\" ar

Answer 1

Just sharing one experience here which might be worth noting when we convert a string value to boolean:

What I was doing is reading a boolean string value from a configuration file which was getting stored in a variable as shown below:

$valueReadFromFile = "false"

Now, I wanted to convert it to Boolean value. Since I was not aware of Convert class in PowerShell I used casting instead as shown below in a bool condition of if block:

if([bool]$valueReadFromFile -eq $true)
{
    echo "This message shouldn't get printed in current scenario"
}

But I was on a wrong turn. Everytime below message was getting printed because non-empty string in PowerShell gets casted to literal boolean value $true:

This message shouldn't get printed in current scenario

When my program started to behave incorrectly then I explored more and came to know about convert class. I fixed my code as below:

$actualBoolValue = [System.Convert]::ToBoolean($valueReadFromFile.Trim())