Safely convert any value to boolean in PHP
Converting some values to boolean is a common task while building applications. Now, these values can be anything.
A pair of numbers. Let’s say 1/0. A pair of strings. Let’s say Yes/No or On/Off. Or even the checkbox’s checked/unchecked status. Scenarios are many.
The problem
Now, if you want to convert any of these pairs to a boolean, you might end up using conditionals. Check the following for example.
$is_public = $_POST['is_public'] == 'Yes';
var_dump($is_public);
// true or false
As you can tell, if we want to convert the Yes/No strings to a boolean value, we can write a conditional that checks the value against the string and it will return true/false accordingly.
This is fine. But there’s a handy way of doing this in PHP that I’m going to talk about in this article.
The filter_var function
There’s a filter_var function in PHP that lets you filter a variable with a specified filter.
Here’s the definition of this function.
filter_var(
mixed $value,
int $filter = FILTER_DEFAULT,
array|int $options = 0
): mixed
As you can tell, the function accepts three parameters where the first parameter is the value that we want to be filtered. There other two are optional whereas the second one would be a predefined filter where we can provide one of the types of filter to filter the value against.
For our use case, we need to use the FILTER_VALIDATE_BOOLEAN filter along with the value.
So, if we want to rewrite the previous example using filter_var, here’s how we can do it.
// $_POST['is_public'] could be Yes/No
$is_public = filter_var(
$_POST['is_public'],
FILTER_VALIDATE_BOOLEAN
);
var_dump($is_public);
// true for `Yes`
// false for `No`
This works on a variety of different other values. Here are all the values that filter_var can effectively convert to their boolean counterpart.
| value | boolean |
|---|---|
| ‘on’ | bool(true) |
| ‘On’ | bool(true) |
| ‘ON’ | bool(true) |
| ‘off’ | bool(false) |
| ‘Off’ | bool(false) |
| ‘OFF’ | bool(false) |
| ‘yes’ | bool(true) |
| ‘Yes’ | bool(true) |
| ‘YES’ | bool(true) |
| ‘no’ | bool(false) |
| ‘No’ | bool(false) |
| ‘NO’ | bool(false) |
| 0 | bool(false) |
| 1 | bool(true) |
| ‘0’ | bool(false) |
| ‘1’ | bool(true) |
| ‘true’ | bool(true) |
| ‘True’ | bool(true) |
| ‘TRUE’ | bool(true) |
| ‘false’ | bool(false) |
| ‘False’ | bool(false) |
| ‘FALSE’ | bool(false) |
| true | bool(true) |
| false | bool(false) |
| ‘foo’ | NULL |
| ‘bar’ | NULL |
Note here that filter_var will return null when it fails to convert the value to a boolean since we passed in FILTER_NULL_ON_FAILURE as the third parameter.
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👋 Hi there! I'm Amit. I write articles about all things web development. You can become a sponsor on my blog to help me continue my writing journey and get your brand in front of thousands of eyes.
