note 92598 deleted from function.array-search by thiago

Note Submitter: reeve dot farmer at yahoo dot com ---- re: greenmr: "Some solutions I've seen here and elsewhere return the index of the found element on a match, and "false" on a fail. Since PHP treats a zero the same as false in expressions, and zero is a valid array index, using false to designate "not found" gives an ambiguous result in some cases. I chose to use the value -1 to signify a search failure instead." You can cope with the 0/false ambiguity simply by making sure to do type-safe comparisons with === and !==. e.g.: <?php if(($i = binarySearch($array)) !== false) { //we had a match } ?> This is how some PHP functions like array_search() work (if you look at the doc for array_search(), there's a warning to make sure to use the same comparison operators). The contributors you refer to were likely modeling their functions on that example.