Posted by Jasper Bryant-Greene on 10/21/05 23:03

On Fri, 2005-10-21 at 21:39 +0200, Chris Knipe wrote:
> Function DoSomething($Blah) {
> $Blah = (int) $Blah;
> return $Blah
> }
>
> $Blah, cannot be larger than 2147483647, and sometimes, I get negative
> integers back from the above function.
>
> This is with PHP 4.4.0 on FreeBSD 5.4-STABLE. Can anyone else perhaps
> confirm this, and if it is indeed true, is this a bug, or a limitation
> somewhere on PHP? Any other ways to confirm that *large* numbers, are
> indeed integers? I'm working with numbers in the form of yyyymmddsss
> (20051025001 for today for example)

It's not a PHP bug. I'm guessing you're on a 32-bit platform. 2147483647
is the maximum length of a signed integer on a 32-bit platform, and PHP
doesn't do unsigned integers.

A date in the form of yyyymmddsss etc. isn't really a number, so if it
was me I'd probably treat it as a string. If you really *have* to treat
it as a number, then use float and get all the precision errors that
come with floating-point, or use binary coded decimal or another
arbitrary precision system.

--
Jasper Bryant-Greene
General Manager
Album Limited

e: jasper@album.co.nz
w: http://www.album.co.nz/
p: 0800 4 ALBUM (0800 425 286) or +64 21 232 3303
a: PO Box 579, Christchurch 8015, New Zealand

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