The PHP Function Ctype_Digit
PHP is an open-source HTML-friendly scripting language that web owners use to create dynamically generated pages. It’s a server-side programming language that runs on most operating systems and platforms. One of its features is its string functions. These help to ensure that a variable is of the correct type. Typically, you’ll use these in an if-statement, or in a loop. The ctype_digit function is one of these.
The ctype_digit function takes in one mandatory parameter, which is the test string that you’re checking. It will return a Boolean value, which is TRUE if the string contains only numeric characters and FALSE if it doesn’t.
When you’re testing a string for its numeric properties, this function is useful to see if all of the characters in the string are valid decimal digits. It’s very similar to the is_numeric function, except that it doesn’t check for negative values or float numbers.
Depending on the application, you may need to use both functions for a complete set of validation. Using both is_numeric and ctype_digit can make your code more robust and help to prevent potential issues down the road.
The ctype_digit function is one part of the Ctype extension in PHP. The ctype extension provides a wide range of functions that can be used to verify the type of variables and other data. Some of the other functions in this library are ctype_alnum() – checks for alphanumeric characters (A-Z, upper or lower case, 0-9, no special characters or punctuation); ctype_space() – checks for whitespace characters, including blanks and control characters; ctype_hex() – checks for hex digits; and ctype_graph() – checks for visually printable characters, excluding control characters and spaces.