PHP -- int typecast of numeric string value giving 0

Question

OK, so there is a page I'm querying on another server that returns a comma separated list of two values. Something it would return would be:

850,640

I have some PHP code that calls file_get_contents on that page and needs to do some numeric calculations based on the two values.

No matter what I try, I can't seem to get an int value out of this.

$res = trim(file_get_contents('http://thatURL/'));
echo "X" . $res . "X<br/>";
list($x,$y) = array_map(create_function('$a', 'return (int)$a;'), explode(',', $res));

echo "X:$x";

results in the output:

X 850,640 X
X:0

Note the spaces before and after the comma separated values(how the hell? I trim'd them!) and that $x is assigned the value 0.

What am I doing wrong here?

Answer 1

What am I doing wrong here?

Nothing, as far as I can see, which indicates that the content of $res is not quite what you expect. Could you change the first echo to:

echo htmlentities($res);

My guess is $res contains some un-printed characters, for example, it is actually:

<span> </span>850,640<span> </span>

or

 850,640 

Answer 2

Try the following. The array_map and llamda function are arguably overkill for your usage.

$res = " 850,640 ";
echo "X" . $res . "X<br/>";
list($x,$y) = explode(',', trim($res));

echo "X:" . (int)$x;
echo "Y:" . (int)$y;

Worked for me, but I'm not using file_get_contents(). If that doesn't work, something else is being output by the page.

Answer 3

PHP is not a typed language. Use intval to convert a string to integer.

Correction: it is a loosely typed language! That's what I meant!

Answer 4

Since I was using file_get_contents() on a URL, there was some HTML being put in as well that I didn't notice in my echo because it parsed out... just empty body and html tags. Oops!