Programming PHP, 2nd Edition

The pval /zval Data Type

Throughout the PHP source code, you will see references to both pval and zval. pval is the old name and is gradually being changed over to zval in the PHP source code. They are the same thing and can be used interchangeably, but zval should be used in new code. The pval/zval is the basic data container in PHP. All data that is passed between the extension API and the user-level script is passed in this container. You can dig into the header files further yourself, but in simple terms, this container is a union that can hold a long, a double, a string including the string length, an array, or an object. The union looks like this:

    typedef union _zvalue_value {
            long lval;
            double dval;
            struct {
                    char *val;
                    int len;
            } str;
            HashTable *ht;
            zend_object_value obj;
    } zvalue_value;

The main things to learn from this union are that all integers are stored as longs, all floating-point values are stored in double-precision, and every string has an associated string length value, which, if properly checked everywhere, makes strings in PHP binary-safe.^[*] Strings should be null-terminated even if they represent binary data; otherwise, the Zend Engine will complain. Since most third-party libraries expect null-terminated strings, this shouldn’t pose a problem.

Along with this union, each container has a flag that holds the currently active type, whether it is a reference or not, and the reference count. So the actual pval/zval structure looks like this:

 struct _zval_struct ...