Hi internals,
PHP's == comparison semantics for strings have a peculiar edge-case, where
comparisons of the form "0e123" == "0e456" return true, because they are
interpreted as floating point zero numbers. This is problematic, because
strings of that form are usually not numbers, but hex-encoded hashes or
similar.
I'm wondering if it may make sense to special-case the comparison semantics
to not consider strings of the form "0e[DIGITS]" equal, unless they are
exactly equal (i.e., fall back to lexicographical if both sides of the
comparison are zero exponentials).
Here's a possible implementation: https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/6749
Of course, the usual rule that you should always use === still holds, but
this at least eliminates the most dangerous edge case.
Regards,
Nikita