MySQL integer field is returned as string in PHP

Question

I have a table field in a MySQL database:

userid INT(11)

So I am calling it to my page with this query:

\"SELECT userid FR         


        

Answer 1

I like Chad's answer, especially when the query results will be passed on to javascript in a browser. Javascript deals cleanly with numeric like entities as numbers but requires extra work to deal with numeric like entities as strings. i.e. must use parseInt or parseFloat on them.

Building on Chad's solution I use this and it is often exactly what I need and creates structures that can be JSON encoded for easy dealing with in javascript.

while ($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {
    // convert numeric looking things to numbers for javascript
    foreach ($row as &$val) {
        if (is_numeric($val))
            $val = $val + 0;
    }
}

Adding a numeric string to 0 produces a numeric type in PHP and correctly identifies the type so floating point numbers will not be truncated into integers.