Hello everyone, I've just joined the list. I'm currently working on a
project with PHP and Firebird 2.0, having just moved up from Firebird 1.5.

One thing I've found out is that Firebird 2 generators produce
Bigints, whereas PHP will only handle 32 bit integers on the Linux
platform I'm using. When I get Bigint values back from the database
PHP presents them to me as strings. Hence, I've run into a few
problems where I've been working with integer values but various PHP
functions of mine now fail because they are designed to handle
integers rather than strings.

While I can fix up individual errors I find, I was wondering if anyone
has any experience of generalising number handling in PHP that would
cope with both strings and number values.

In the PHP manual there are GMP Functions:
http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.gmp.php

Also other libs such as PEAR Bigint:
http://pear.php.net/reference/Crypt_RSA-1.0.0/Crypt_RSA/_Crypt_RSA-1.0.0_RSA_Math_BigInt_php.html

Has anyone used these, or anything similar, and are there any
significant performance issues when using these functions.

Thanks for any feedback you can offer.

Max