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From: "J.O. Aho" <user@example.net>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.php
Subject: Re: bug in  is_numeric
Date: Mon, 13 May 2013 19:55:01 +0200
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On 13/05/13 16:15, fred wrote:

> Otherwise I'm done repeating myself.
> > > if(is_numeric('x11.11c')  returns  TRUE
> > > and variations eg: z1111x is also true
 > >
> > Could you try the following code and let me know what comes out?
> >  <?php $a = is_numeric('x11.11c'); var_dump($a); ?>
>
> OK I get false when I do that.
> "bool(false)" to be more precise.
> var_export($a)also reports false if thats any help.
>
> I have just typed in an exact copy of the test in my message of 02:58pm
> When you have run that on an apache PHP installation of the same version
> PHP as I listed (5.3.6) under windows7-64 bit - get back to me.

Apparently there is nothing wrong with your is_numeric() as you state 
var_export did return "bool(false)" which is the expected result.

you fail to show the code you actually used (the example you gave don't 
have correct syntax, so I doubt it's from your actual code, just 
something you wrote).

As other already pointed out, you are most likely expecting a specific 
value to been set, but most likely it's another value (bad coding which 
uses "global" values which are used in many functions will in most cases 
have a more random nature of what value it will have) or that your 
if-statement includes a negation for example:

if(!is_numeric("abcdef")) {
	echo "my code is buggy, not is_numeric()\n";
}

By the way, var_export() don't return false, it will return null by 
default or a string (if you set the return argument to true).
If you made a check on what var_export() returned and you got it to be 
equal to false, then your method of checking the return value is utterly 
flawed.

The release of PHP 5.3.6 is over two years ago, and if there had been a 
bug, then it had been discovered a lot earlier than now on a function 
which is heavily used in a lot of PHP code and the code base isn't 
platform dependent.

My recommendation would be to upgrade to 5.4.14, if you can't find it 
for your OS, then upgrade to one which provides it.

-- 

  //Aho