Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:26240
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Received-SPF: pass (pb1.pair.com: domain gmail.com designates 64.233.182.188 as permitted sender)
DomainKey-Status: good
DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws;
        s=beta; d=gmail.com;
        h=received:from:reply-to:to:subject:date:user-agent:mime-version:content-type:content-transfer-encoding:content-disposition:message-id;
        b=DDoKJbQL2E1NDaAylXubcjecAa3At5kf6XtZX+Wunj1oJal4+lzmk3jO1Ev7p6RDVCbqfv/zkHZipZkHzss1JyVplRVUYfS7fPF/Hnu+DazsN6Hbym6PkTi8XTYrW0zFlEqV4qq8CoO1U1moG30mlj/raH+V8nVIUQx/Vd/xOq4=
Reply-To: keo.skalpa@gmail.com
To: internals@lists.php.net
Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2006 08:40:27 +0200
User-Agent: KMail/1.9.5
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
  charset="us-ascii"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Disposition: inline
Message-ID: <200610250840.27409.keo.skalpa@gmail.com>
Subject: Smaller fix for the ext/filter boolean filter limitation (was Re: cvs: php-src /ext/filter long subject)
From: keo.skalpa@gmail.com (Skalpa Keo)


Hi,

First my apologies for not being able to go a real reply to the real thread, 
but I just subscribed to the list a couple days ago (and the original thread 
subject was way too long anyway ;-)).

> > Boolean values are the only case where it is not possible to 
> > distinguish FALSE from invalid as they can be FALSE, but it is really 
> > not an issue.
> If it wasn't an issue I wouldn't have fixed it.

IMHO there's a more simple way to fix that without changing all the functions 
behavior. I think the distinction between NULL (non-existent data) and FALSE 
(invalid) should be kept and that having both cases return NULL, thus forcing 
users to use filter_has_var() to determine what this NULL means is a bit 
counter-intuitive.

A quite smaller modification of the boolean filter behavior could allow this 
(I'm sorry I can't send you a patch, but I'm a "PHP user" who hasn't touched 
a C source file for years... I'll try and do better next time if I can).

Make php_filter_boolean() return:
- (int)1 when the value is 1/on/true/yes
- (int)0 when the value is 0/off/false/no
- (bool)false when the value is something else

This is mostly backward compatible, as PHP considers that 0 == false and 1 == 
true, and would still allow people like Derick who'd need to make a 
difference between a "valid" boolean and an invalid value the possibility to 
do so by testing the returned value using ===.

Also, it would just require a small change in one single function, which I 
think would be more safe considering 5.2.0 is already an RC5.

Hoping I could be helpful,

skalpa.>