Req #38409 [Com]: parse_ini_file() looses the type of booleans

Edit report at https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=38409&edit=1 ID: 38409 Comment by: pwinnski at gmail dot com Reported by: yury at shurup dot com Summary: parse_ini_file() looses the type of booleans Status: Open Type: Feature/Change Request Package: PHP options/info functions Operating System: Ubuntu 8.04.1 PHP Version: 5.2.4-2ubuntu5.4 with Suhosin-Patch 0.9.6.2 (cli) Block user comment: N Private report: N New Comment: PHP 5.3.6 on Centos. Still not fixed, so I must explicitly cast to boolean in the code that reads the ini file. Previous Comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2010-08-31 23:33:03] guy dot paddock at redbottledesign dot com Hrm, it also looks like there's a similar problem for integers -- they become integer strings, so is_int() returns FALSE on them. Why doesn't parse_ini_file() translate values to the appropriate type? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2010-08-31 17:07:06] guy dot paddock at redbottledesign dot com I also second the fact that parse_ini_file() should parse booleans as boolean types, rather than strings. In my application, the values returned from parsing the INI file are checked to ensure that they are the correct type (string, bool, int, etc). That way, if the user accidentally typed the wrong value in for a setting, they are presented with the appropriate error message, rather than having their value interpreted incorrectly. Unfortunately, the way that parse_ini_file() parses booleans, it converts "TRUE" and "FALSE" into "1" or an empty string "", which means that is_bool() returns FALSE. I understand perfectly that is_bool() is intended only to determine if a variable really is a boolean -- my problem is not with that function. My problem is with parse_ini_file()'s counter-intuitive behavior of not parsing boolean values into a boolean type. Why else would we want it interpreting boolean constants in the first place? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2008-12-12 14:43:42] yury at shurup dot com It is very sad that this bug is still not classified, fixed and is perfectly reproducible after about 2 years since my original posting. I hope I would be able to hack on the sources some day but surely not during the next year to come. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2008-12-12 13:14:15] philipp dot kempgen at amooma dot de In addition to that I want NULL (unquoted) to be of type NULL. Unquoted integers => int, unquoted floating point numbers => float/double. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2008-12-12 13:04:57] philipp dot kempgen at amooma dot de Same problem on Linux and PHP 5(.1). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The remainder of the comments for this report are too long. To view the rest of the comments, please view the bug report online at https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=38409 -- Edit this bug report at https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=38409&edit=1