get_option() returns Integers as strings

[golderweb]

For Options which are ​declared to be Integers there, get_options() always returns the Integer as a string like this:

$value = get_option( 'comment_max_links' );
var_dump( $value );

---

Result:

string '2'

Maybe it would be more intuitive if get_option would return an integer since is_int() will return "FALSE" on "integer-strings".
Otherwise the ​Option_Reference and the ​Function Reference should be changed to something like "numeric-string".

[SergeyBiryukov]

Related: #20712, #24528.

[boonebgorges]

See also #22192. All scalar values passed to update_option() are ultimately stored in a 'longtext' field in the database, which means that they're retrieved as strings. There's nothing we can really do about this, given the current schema - it doesn't seem safe to me to assume that anything numeric should be cast to int/float during get_option(). We could probably make this a bit clearer in the inline documentation.

[MikeHansenMe]

31820.diff​ changes the doc to show the return value is a string. If you do need to force something to be an int you could do something like

function force_int( $value ) {
   if ( is_numeric( $value ) ) {
       return (int) $value;
   }
}
add_filter( 'option_your_option_name', 'force_int' );

​https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Filter_Reference/option_(option_name)

[boonebgorges]

31820.diff​ won't work, because non-scalar values - objects, arrays, anything serializable - are not returned as strings.

The suggestion made in 3 by @MikeHansenMe is a good one. I'll add a bit of inline documentation that gestures at it.

[boonebgorges]

In 36234:

Clarify return types in get_option() documentation.

The new note specifies that scalar values will always be returned as strings.

Fixes #31820.