php returning mixed data types - good or bad

Question

When returning values in php, is it considered good or bad practice to return mixed data types. I\'m working on a project where I am constantly faced with methods that return a

Answer 1

What I usually do is if the method worked, return the value, and if it failed return FALSE. That's what a lot of PHP's built-in methods do. So, then you can just check if the function returned FALSE or not.