In PHP 4.07 (RC1, RC2 and latest snapshot, standard windows build) returning a boolean from a COM object is broken.

I reported this on PHP-QA a while ago but there was no response to it.  That report was primarily to do with returning booleans from a database accessed via an ADO COM object.  But now I've found it's true for all booleans.

When you have a COM object returning a boolean, testing that boolean for 'trueness' fails.

The following script:

<?php

$obj = new COM('com.object');

$arg = $obj->TestFunc();    // Simple function that just returns TRUE

var_dump($arg);

if ($arg == TRUE)
   echo "arg is true<BR>";
elseif ($arg == FALSE)
   echo "arg is false<BR>";
else
   echo "arg is something else<BR>";

if ($arg)
  echo "<BR>arg is true, but not equal to true<BR>";
?>

produces this output:

>bool(true)
>arg is something else
>
>arg is true, but not equal to true
>

Basically, if you test for equality to 'true' it fails, but it's also not false.  But if you just test directly on the value it works fine.

I stepped through the source and it appears to be due to the way comparison of booleans is done.  The COM object returns a boolean by creating a Variant of type BOOL and value -1.  whereas PHP creates a boolean of type BOOL and value 1.  The comparison then messes up due to this, I think.

I've also tried this with PHP 4.06 and the problem doesn't occur in that version