On Tue, Aug 26, 2025, at 1:36 PM, Tim Düsterhus wrote: > Hi > > On 8/26/25 16:48, Larry Garfield wrote: >> I have multiple times just recently had need of "I have a numeric string, >> should I cast it to an int or a float?", for which an >> is_representable_as_int() function (or similar) would be quite helpful, and >> neater than the messy solution I usually use. > > It would've been nice to know what that use-case is, rather than just > knowing that you had that use-case. > > I'm having a hard time thinking of something where I don't a-priori know > what type I expect to get and would need to inspect the value to make a > decision. > > I see how having a function that safely coerces a string into an int, > returning null if coercion fails, basically intval() with better error > handling and taking only `string`s, could be useful, but that's not what > is being asked here. > > Best regards > Tim Düsterhus
When doing generic serialization, the input is often always-strings (eg, environment variables, HTTP Query parameters, etc.) When doing generic code (not type generics, but "works on anything" kind of generic), I often have to resort to this: https://github.com/Crell/EnvMapper/blob/master/src/EnvMapper.php#L88 Which gets the job done, but feels ugly to me. Even if I know what the target type is, I still need to ask the question "so does this string match the target type?" https://github.com/Crell/Carica/blob/master/src/Middleware/NormalizeArgumentTypesMiddleware.php#L73 "I have a string, the parameter wants an int, is that even possible?" Being able to replace that floor() nonsense with is_integerable() (by whatever name) would make my life a lot easier. For float, is_numeric() is already sufficient for my purposes. I just need to be able to differentiate between "3" and "3.14" to cast to the correct type. --Larry Garfield
