How do you check if a variable is equal to a string in PHP?

is_string() of an integer or float returns false, so it might be useful to include an is_numeric() when checking if a value is stringy:

function is_stringy($val) {
  return (is_string($val) || is_numeric($val)
    || (is_object($val) && method_exists($val, '__toString')));
}
?>

Test code (which should print "vector N OK" for each test vector):
foreach ([[NULL, false], [false, false], [true, false],
  [0, true], [[], false], [0.1, true], ["x", true],
  ["", true], [new Exception("x"), true]] as $idx => $vector) {
  list ($val, $expected) = $vector;
  if (is_stringy($val) != $expected) {
    print ("mismatch at $idx\n");
    var_dump($val);
  } else {
    print ("vector $idx OK\n");
  }
}
?>

The following is an example of how to test if a variable is set, whether or not it is NULL. It makes use of the fact that an unset variable will throw an E_NOTICE error, but one initialized as NULL will not.

function var_exists($var){
    if (empty($GLOBALS['var_exists_err'])) {
        return true;
    } else {
        unset($GLOBALS['var_exists_err']);
        return false;
    }
}

function var_existsHandler($errno, $errstr, $errfile, $errline) {
   $GLOBALS['var_exists_err'] = true;
}

$l = NULL;
set_error_handler("var_existsHandler", E_NOTICE);
echo (var_exists($l)) ? "True " : "False ";
echo (var_exists($k)) ? "True " : "False ";
restore_error_handler();

?>

Outputs:
True False

The problem is, the set_error_handler and restore_error_handler calls can not be inside the function, which means you need 2 extra lines of code every time you are testing. And if you have any E_NOTICE errors caused by other code between the set_error_handler and restore_error_handler they will not be dealt with properly. One solution:

function var_exists($var){
   if (empty($GLOBALS['var_exists_err'])) {
       return true;
   } else {
       unset($GLOBALS['var_exists_err']);
       return false;
   }
}

function var_existsHandler($errno, $errstr, $errfile, $errline) {
    $filearr = file($errfile);
    if (strpos($filearr[$errline-1], 'var_exists') !== false) {
        $GLOBALS['var_exists_err'] = true;
        return true;
    } else {
        return false;
    }
}

$l = NULL;
set_error_handler("var_existsHandler", E_NOTICE);
echo (var_exists($l)) ? "True " : "False ";
echo (var_exists($k)) ? "True " : "False ";
is_null($j);
restore_error_handler();

?>

function var_exists($var){
    if (empty($GLOBALS['var_exists_err'])) {
        return true;
    } else {
        unset($GLOBALS['var_exists_err']);
        return false;
    }
}1

function var_exists($var){
    if (empty($GLOBALS['var_exists_err'])) {
        return true;
    } else {
        unset($GLOBALS['var_exists_err']);
        return false;
    }
}2

In summary, strcmp() does not necessarily use the ASCII code order of each character like in the 'C' locale, but instead parse each string to match language-specific character entities (such as 'ch' in Spanish, or 'dz' in Czech), whose collation order is then compared. When both character entities have the same collation order (such as 'ss' and '?' in German), they are compared relative to their code by strcmp(), or considered equal by strcasecmp().
The LC_COLLATE locale setting is then considered: only if LC_COLLATE=C or LC_ALL=C does strcmp() compare strings by character code.
Generally, most locales define the following order:
control, space, punctuation and underscore, digit, alpha (lower then upper with Latin scripts; or final, middle, then isolated, initial with Arabic script), symbols, others...
With strcasecmp(), the alpha subclass is ignored and consider all forms of letters as equal.
Note also that some locales behave differently with accented characters: some consider they are the same letter as the unaccented letter (with a minor collation order, e.g. French, Italian, Spanish), some consider they are distinct letters with an independant collation order (e.g. in the C locale, or in Nordic languages).
Finally, the collation string is not considering individual characters but instead groups of characters that form a single letter:
- for example "ch" or "CH" in Spanish which is always after all other strings beginning with 'c' or 'C', including "cz", but before 'd' or 'D';
- 'ss' and '?' in German;
- 'dz', 'DZ' and 'Dz' in some Central European languages written with the Latin script...
- UTF-8, UTF-16 (Unicode), S-JIS, Big5, ISO2022 character encoding of a locale (the suffix in the locale name) first decode the characters into the UCS4/ISO10646 code position before applying the rules of the language indicated by the main locale...
So be extremely careful to what you consider a "character", as it may just mean a encoding byte with no significance in the string collation algorithm: the first character of the string "cholera" in Spanish is "ch", not "c" !

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