PHP - Get bool to echo false when false

Question

The following code doesn\'t print out anything:

$bool_val = (bool)false;
echo $bool_val;

But the following code prints 1:

Answer 1

json_encode will do it out-of-the-box, but it's not pretty (indented, etc):

echo json_encode(array('whatever' => TRUE, 'somethingelse' => FALSE));

...gives...

{"whatever":true,"somethingelse":false}