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

You can do this with...

1. mysql_fetch_field()
2. mysqli_result::fetch_field_direct or
3. PDOStatement::getColumnMeta()

...depending on the extension you want to use. The first is not recommended because the mysql extension is deprecated. The third is still experimental.

The comments at these hyperlinks do a good job of explaining how to set your type from a plain old string to its original type in the database.

Some frameworks also abstract this (CodeIgniter provides $this->db->field_data()).

You could also do guesswork--like looping through your resulting rows and using is_numeric() on each. Something like:

foreach($result as &$row){
 foreach($row as &$value){
  if(is_numeric($value)){
   $value = (int) $value;
  }       
 }       
}

This would turn anything that looks like a number into one...definitely not perfect.