How to Get Type of Variable in PHP

John on January 28, 2022

Type checking will tell us what type of "thing" a variable is. In PHP we can get the variable data type using the built-in gettype() function.

To use gettype() Pass the variable as the first argument. Here is an example:

$thing = ['a', 'b', 'c'];

$result = gettype($thing);

echo($result);

array

The variable we supplied is an array and that is indeed what gettype() returned it as.

Here is the full list of possible data type strings gettype() will return:

• "boolean"
• "integer"
• "double" (for historical reasons "double" is returned in case of a float, and not simply "float")
• "string"
• "array"
• "object"
• "resource"
• "resource (closed)" as of PHP 7.2.0
• "NULL"
• "unknown type"