Last time we looked at text and strings in variables, in this episode we're going to continue with our exploration of PHP variables and delve deeper into math and number handling in PHP. Using numbers is not much different to using text and strings, you allocate variables and fill them in, using exactly the same techniques as you do using strings & text.

They covers some of the basic operators (+,-,*,etc), evaluation with equals, number shifting, binary and creating a "barrel shifter" to work with the binary bits of a number.

Being a whimsical sort, I decided that actually implementing his request would be more fun than simply pish-poshing it. I'm not suggesting this be part of PHP6 (I still don't personally think it's a good idea), but it's a fun exercise and good for a conversation starter...

There's several things she can now do with the special characters including dumping out the results of divisions, comparisons and fractions natively.

Wez Furlong gives us good news about implementing the math functions needed to support TypeKey and OpenID more directly within PHP.

Paul also mentions that the Solar framework has also had the Typekey support integrated for a while now (as an adapter) that uses the "big-number math functions" currently available to PHP developers. Wez's solution, however, would just about make those obsolete.

Included in their list of common problems for budding PHP developers are things like finding a "needle" in a string "haystack", working with constants, using and/or, and the __toString functionality in PHP5.