First of all, echo
is not a function, it is a language construct and it does not actually “return” anything. echo
is for outputting strings. The reason it outputs (not returns) 1
instead of true
is because true
is not a string, it is a boolean value and therefore when it is typecast to a string, PHP converts it to "1"
. If you want to see the real value of something, you need to use something like var_dump()
.
var_dump(true);
var_dump((string) true);
var_dump(5 === 5);
var_dump(false);
var_dump((string) false);
var_dump(5 === 6);
Output:
bool(true)
string(1) "1"
bool(true)
bool(false)
string(0) ""
bool(false)
3
solved Why this result in PHP?