Joseph Scott has a new post to his blog looking at "why PHP strings equal zero" - that when you use the "==" operator on a string to compare to zero, it's true.

The issue of PHP strings equaling zero has come up a few times recently. [...] Running that will display Equals zero!, which at first glance probably doesn’t make much sense. So what is going on here?

He gets into the specifics of what's happening - a bit of type jugging, less strict comparison since it's the "==" versus "===" and how the PHP manual talks about strings being converted to numbers.

While I still think it is odd that the string gets cast as an integer instead of the other way around, I don’t think this is a big deal. I can’t recall a single time where I’ve ever run into this issue in a PHP app. I’ve only seen it come up in contrived examples like the ones above.