PDO and PDO::PARAM_INT

Hi there Mr. PDO!

We’ve come to know each other, and yes, while you have your troubles (.. which I don’t, of course), I’ve accepted your short comings. Today you threw another one of your fits, but I’ll be sure to document it for the world to see.

$statement = $pdo->prepare("
    ...
    LIMIT
        :offset, :hits
");

Yep. This will of course fail if you’re binding strings. ’10’, ’10’ is not very helpful now, is it. Good point. So let’s tell PDO that we’re really binding ints:

$statement->bindValue(':offset', $offset, PDO::PARAM_INT);
$statement->bindValue(':hits', $hits, PDO::PARAM_INT);

But wait. You’re still complaining?! I told you they were ints?! What’s the problem now?!?!

Well. Mr. PDO requires you to also convert the values for him. So first you have to convert the values of a loosely typed language to a strong type, then you have to tell the library that yes, this is in fact another type than what the library obviously assumes that it is. This works:

$statement->bindValue(':offset', (int) $offset, PDO::PARAM_INT);
$statement->bindValue(':hits', (int) $hits, PDO::PARAM_INT);

Which means the following:

If the type of your variable internally is a string, it’ll be escaped as a string, even if you tell PDO that it should be handled as an INT in your database layer.

If the type of your variable is an int, it’ll be handled as a string, unless you tell PDO it is an int.

Something is backwards here.