Re: Strings and Characters therein

>so when is a value contained in a string an integer rather than a character? Never. GetType() returns the underlying data type that the variable is marked with. > and can i convert from character to integer? Yes. Several different ways. You can use something like: $foo = (int) $bar; which will convert all characters from the 0th character through the first non-integer character to integer. A leading negative sign (aka "dash") is also supported. Samples: (int) "56K" ==> 56 (int) "-10 degrees" ==> -10 (int) "Pennsylvania 6500" ==> 0 (actually, I think it might return false, or...) In your case, an ereg_replace() or preg_replace() call would probably be more suitable. If I knew Regexp better I'd give samples, but I don't so I won't, but http://php.net has them. And, of course, your routine will also work, though perhaps not quite as fast nor as understandable to other programmers as ereg_replace. (OTOH, I can read your code, and can never figure out Regexp, but that's just me...) > is all data recieved from HTML forms considered to be a text string? Yes. This is probably in the FAQ somewhere...