As per bug #34199 and as Rob points out, if($obj) and if(!$obj) are handled by different opcodes and these two opcodes are inconsistent in whether they call an object's cast_object handler.
if($obj) results in a ZEND_JMPZ_SPEC_CV_HANDLER which calls i_zend_is_true() which always return true for objects, no matter what (ignore compatibility mode here) because of this code in zend_execute.h: case IS_OBJECT: if(IS_ZEND_STD_OBJECT(*op)) { TSRMLS_FETCH(); if(EG(ze1_compatibility_mode)) { result = (zend_hash_num_elements(Z_OBJPROP_P(op))?1:0); } else { result = 1; } } else { result = 1; } break; if(!$obj) results in a which calls convert_to_boolean() which in turn calls convert_object_to_type() which has: if (Z_OBJ_HT_P(op)->cast_object) { if (Z_OBJ_HT_P(op)->cast_object(op, op, ctype, 1 TSRMLS_CC) == SUCCESS) { op->type = ctype; } This means that any object which actually implements a cast_object handler that returns false under some condition will be broken. The simple example is: $a = simplexml_load_string('<a></a>'); if($a && !$a) echo "BUG!"; I think we need to fix i_zend_is_true's IS_OBJECT case to check to see if the object has a cast_object handler and call it or just call convert_to_boolean() there. Or we need to clean this up and not have such different codepaths for these two cases. -Rasmus -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php