How do the PHP equality (== double equals) and identity (=== triple equals) comparison operators differ?

Question

What is the difference between == and === in PHP?

What would be some useful examples?

---

Additionally, how are these operators us

Answer 1

All of the answers so far ignore a dangerous problem with ===. It has been noted in passing, but not stressed, that integer and double are different types, so the following code:

$n = 1000;
$d = $n + 0.0e0;
echo '
'. ( ($n ==  $d)?'equal' :'not equal' );
echo '
'. ( ($n === $d)?'equal' :'not equal' );

gives:

 equal
 not equal

Note that this is NOT a case of a "rounding error". The two numbers are exactly equal down to the last bit, but they have different types.

This is a nasty problem because a program using === can run happily for years if all of the numbers are small enough (where "small enough" depends on the hardware and OS you are running on). However, if by chance, an integer happens to be large enough to be converted to a double, its type is changed "forever" even though a subsequent operation, or many operations, might bring it back to a small integer in value. And, it gets worse. It can spread - double-ness infection can be passed along to anything it touches, one calculation at a time.

In the real world, this is likely to be a problem in programs that handle dates beyond the year 2038, for example. At this time, UNIX timestamps (number of seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC) will require more than 32-bits, so their representation will "magically" switch to double on some systems. Therefore, if you calculate the difference between two times you might end up with a couple of seconds, but as a double, rather than the integer result that occurs in the year 2017.

I think this is much worse than conversions between strings and numbers because it is subtle. I find it easy to keep track of what is a string and what is a number, but keeping track of the number of bits in a number is beyond me.

So, in the above answers there are some nice tables, but no distinction between 1 (as an integer) and 1 (subtle double) and 1.0 (obvious double). Also, advice that you should always use === and never == is not great because === will sometimes fail where == works properly. Also, JavaScript is not equivalent in this regard because it has only one number type (internally it may have different bit-wise representations, but it does not cause problems for ===).

My advice - use neither. You need to write your own comparison function to really fix this mess.