PHP equivalent of NET Java s toString

Question

How do I convert the value of a PHP variable to string   I was looking for something better than concatenating with an empty string    myText    myVar         Like the ToString   method in Java or  NET

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You can always create a method named  ToString  in  that returns   in

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As others have mentioned  objects need a   toString method to be cast to a string  An object that doesn t define that method can still produce a string representation using the spl object hash function      This function returns a unique identifier for the object  This id can be used as a hash key for storing objects  or for identifying an object  as long as the object is not destroyed  Once the object is destroyed  its hash may be reused for other objects    I have a base Object class with a   toString method that defaults to calling md5 spl object hash  this   to make the output clearly unique  since the output from spl object hash can look very similar between objects   This is particularly helpful for debugging code where a variable initializes as an Object and later in the code it is suspected to have changed to a different Object  Simply echoing the variables to the log can reveal the change from the object hash  or not

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You can use the casting operators    myText    string  myVar    There are more details for string casting and conversion in the Strings section of the PHP manual  including special handling for booleans and nulls

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How do I convert the value of a PHP   variable to string    A value can be converted to a string using the  string  cast or the strval   function   Edit  As Thomas also stated    It also should be automatically casted for you when you use it as a string

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You can either use typecasting    var    string  varname    or StringValue    var   strval  varname     or SetType    success   settype  varname   string        varname itself becomes a string   They all work for the same thing in terms of Type-Juggling

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Double quotes should work too    it should create a string  then it should APPEND INSERT the casted STRING value of  myVar in between 2 empty strings

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In addition to the answer given by Thomas G  Mayfield    If you follow the link to the string casting manual  there is a special case which is quite important to understand    string  cast is preferable especially if your variable  a is an object  because PHP will follow the casting protocol according to its object model by calling   toString   magic method  if such is defined in the class of which  a is instantiated from    PHP does something similar to  function castToString  instance          if  is object  instance   amp  amp  method exists  instance     toString              return call user func array array  instance     toString               The  string  casting operation is a recommended technique for PHP5  programming making code more Object-Oriented  IMO this is a nice example of design similarity  difference  to other OOP languages like Java C  etc   i e  in its own special PHP way  whenever it s for the good or for the worth

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If you re converting anything other than simple types like integers or booleans  you d need to write your own function method for the type that you re trying to convert  otherwise PHP will just print the type  such as array  GoogleSniffer  or Bidet

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For primitives just use  string  var or print this variable straight away  PHP is dynamically typed language and variable will be casted to string on the fly   If you want to convert objects to strings you will need to define   toString   method that returns string  This method is forbidden to throw exceptions

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Try this little strange  but working  approach to convert the textual part of stdClass to string type    my std obj result    SomeResponse- gt return- gt data     Specific to object implementation   my string result   implode   array  my std obj result      Do conversion

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I think this question is a bit misleading since  toString   in Java isn t just a way to cast something to a String  That is what casting via  string  or String valueOf   does  and it works as well in PHP      Java String myText    string  myVar      PHP  myText    string   myVar    Note that this can be problematic as Java is type-safe  see here for more details    But as I said  this is casting and therefore not the equivalent of Java s toString     toString in Java doesn t just cast an object to a String  It instead will give you the String representation  And that s what   toString   in PHP does      Java class SomeClass      public String toString            return  some string representation               PHP class SomeClass      public function   toString                 return  some string representation             And from the other side      Java new SomeClass   toString        Some string representation      PHP strval new SomeClass       Some string representation    What do I mean by  giving the String representation   Imagine a class for a library with millions of books    Casting that class to a String would  by default  convert the data  here all books  into a string so the String would be very long and most of the time not very useful either  To String instead will give you the String representation  i e   only the name of the library  This is shorter and therefore gives you less  but more important information    These are both valid approaches but with very different  goals  neither is a perfect solution for every case and you have to chose wisely which fits better for your needs   Sure  there are even more options    no   421337     A number in PHP  str     no      In PHP  stuff inside    is calculated and variables are replaced  str   print r  no  true      Same as String format     str   settype  no   string       Sets  no to the String Type  str   strval  no      Get the string value of  no  str    no          As you said concatenate an empty string works too   All of these methods will return a String  some of them using   toString internally and some others will fail on Objects  Take a look at the PHP documentation for more details

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I think it is worth mentioning that you can catch any output  like print r  var dump  in a variable by using output buffering    lt  php     ob start        var dump  someVar        result   ob get clean      gt    Thanks to  How can I capture the result of var dump to a string

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toString method or  string  cast  string  string  variable     force make string   you can treat an object as a string  class Foo      public function   toString            return  quot foo quot           echo new Foo      foo  also  have another trick  i assume i  have int variable i want to make string it   string     intvariable

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Use print r    myText   print r  myVar true     You can also use it like     myText   print r  myVar true   foo bar     This will set  myText to a string  like   array     0   gt   11    foo bar   Use var export to get a little bit more info  with types of variable         myText   var export  myVar true

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Some  if not all  of the methods in the previous answers fail when the intended string variable has a leading zero  for example  077543   An attempt to convert such a variable fails to get the intended string  because the variable is converted to base 8  octal    All these will make  str have a value of 32611    no   077543  str    string  no   str     no    str   print r  no true    str   strval  no    str   settype  no   integer

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For objects  you may not be able to use the cast operator  Instead  I use the json encode   method   For example  the following will output contents to the error log   error log json encode  args

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This is done with typecasting    strvar    string   var     Casts to string echo  var     Will cast to string implicitly var dump  var      Will show the true type of the variable   In a class you can define what is output by using the magical method   toString  An example is below   class Bottles       public function   toString                 return  Ninety nine green bottles             ex   new Bottles  var dump  ex   string   ex      Returns  instance of Bottles and  Ninety nine green bottles    Some more type casting examples    i   1      int 1 var dump  int   i       bool true var dump  bool   i       string  1  var dump  string  1

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The documentation says that you can also do    str     foo     It s the same as cast  but I think it looks prettier   Source    Russian   English

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Putting it in double quotes should work    myText     myVar

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parent category name    new clothes  amp  shoes       To make it to string option one  parent category   strval  parent category name       Or make it a string by concatenating it with  new clothes  amp  shoes     It is useful for database queries  parent category         strval  parent category name

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PHP is dynamically typed  so like Chris Fournier said   If you use it like a string it becomes a string   If you re looking for more control over the format of the string then printf is your answer

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Another option is to use the built in settype function    lt  php  foo    5bar      string  bar   true       boolean  settype  foo   integer        foo is now 5    integer  settype  bar   string         bar is now  1   string    gt    This actually performs a conversion on the variable unlike typecasting and allows you to have a general way of converting to multiple types

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You can also use the var export PHP function

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You are looking for strval   string strval   mixed  var   Get the string value of a variable  See the documentation on string for more information on converting to string  This function performs no formatting on the returned value  If you are looking for a way to format a numeric value as a string  please see sprintf   or number format

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I use variableToString  It handles every PHP type and is flexible  you can extend it if you want

[php] PHP equivalent of .NET/Java's toString()

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