* * * * *
                                        
                       Whose bright idea was that design?
                                        
> If anyone is wondering why: PHP's strpos() returns “false” when the second
> string argument does not occur as a substring of the first argument, and
> returns 0 when the second string argument occurs at position 0 of the first
> string argument. Thus, strpos( “/admin”, “/admin” ) returns 0, but strpos(
> “Cabbage/admin”, “/admin” ) will return a positive integer.
> 
> You're supposed to test the return value explicitly: “if( strpos( $a, $b )
> !== false)”, but it only says that like five times in giant red letters on
> the manual page (http://us2.php.net/strpos) so it's easy to see how someone
> could miss it.
> 

“Re: Cabbage Based Authentication [1]”

Besides being reason #3.1415926 for hating PHP [2], this is a further example
of my dislike for dynamically typed languages (and muddled thinking [3]).
What we have here is a function that returns a positive integer if we find
one string within another, but a boolean otherwise. This mixing of return
types is futher compounded by the fact that in PHP, an integer value of 0 is
also treated as the boolean “false” value.

So let's not fix strpos() to return something sane, like -1 for “string not
found,” let's instead extend the langauge with a silly “boolean only
comparison” to fix this particular problem.

I would really love to know what Rasmus Lerdorf was smoking [4] …

[1] http://worsethanfailure.com/Comments/Cabbage_Based_Authentication.aspx#
[2] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2004/11/11.3
[3] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2006/06/05.1
[4] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2005/03/08.2

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

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