In PHP, you'll find that there's an = operator (that's one = sign), an == operator (that's two equals signs) and an === operator (triple equals). The single = sign is an assignment - it tells PHP to work out the expression to the right of the = sign and save it to the variable / location named on the left. Both == and === perform comparisons - so what's the difference?

== (double equals) is an equality test - it checks whether the values to the left and right of the == operator have the same value - for example, it could check if they're both the value 10. It will return a true value, though, if you compare the integer 10 to the floaring point number 10.0, or if you compare either of those to the string "10.00" ... they're all the value 10, after all!

=== (triple equals) is an identity operator which checks if the values to the left and the right of the === operator have the same value AND are of the same type, so it can only return a true value if you compare two integers or two floats or two strings ... it is bound to return a false value if you compare a float to an integer, even if they both contain the value 10.

Example:


<?php
$first = 10;
$second = 10.0;
$third = "10";

if ($first == 10) print "One";
if ($second == 10) print "Two";
if ($third == 10) print "Three";

if ($third === 10) print "Four";
if ($second === 10) print "Five";
if ($first === 10) print "Six";
?>


Will print out
OneTwoThreeSix


(written 2005-08-08, updated 2006-06-05)

 H104 - PHP - Control Statements
  [340] Code and code maintainance efficiency - (2005-06-08)
  [353] Wimbledon Neck - (2005-06-20)
  [421] Don't repeat code - use loops or functions - (2005-08-21)
  [657] The ternary operator in Python - (2006-03-25)
  [863] Double and Triple equals operator in PHP - (2006-09-12)
  [962] Breaking a loop - Ruby and other languages - (2006-12-03)
  [1191] Smart English Output - via PHP and Perl ? : operator - (2007-05-18)
  [1199] Testing for one of a list of values. - (2007-05-22)
  [1220] for loop - how it works (Perl, PHP, Java, C, etc) - (2007-06-06)
  [1477] Decisions - small ones, or big ones? - (2007-12-18)
  [1696] Saying NOT in Perl, PHP, Python, Lua ... - (2008-07-04)
  [1825] Question Mark - Colon operator (Perl and PHP) - (2008-10-08)
  [2304] Extracting real data from an exported file in PHP or Perl - (2009-07-25)
  [2912] Predictions for the seagull population - (2010-08-09)
  [3200] How a for loop works Java, Perl and other languages - (2011-03-12)
  [3397] Does a for loop evaluate its end condition once, or on every iteration? - (2011-08-18)
  [3895] Flowchart to program - learning to program with Well House - (2012-10-14)
  [3914] While, for, foreach or something else to loop. - (2012-11-06)
  [4322] Learning to Program - the conditional statement (if) - (2014-11-21)
  [4323] Learning to program - Loop statements such as while - (2014-11-22)

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Functions and commands with dangerous names
Can an older person learn a programming language
Theft of training material
Assignment, equality and identity in PHP
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