Doing a mysqli query and COUNTing the results, is there a preferred comparison operator & string enquoting to use?

For example

$query = mysqli_query($connect, "SELECT COUNT(`user_id`) FROM `users` WHERE `user_color` = '{$color}'");
$result = mysqli_fetch_assoc($query);
if ($result['COUNT(`user_id`)'] != 0){
 -- then do something....

My question is, what are the implications of using:

if ($result['COUNT(`user_id`)'] != '0'){

versus

if ($result['COUNT(`user_id`)'] != 0){

• php
• mysql
• comparison-operators

Both are same, php takes care of string and number.

Internally functionality of php interpreter: If you compare a number with a string or the comparison involves numerical strings, then each string is converted to a number and the comparison performed numerically.

My preference would be:

... "SELECT COUNT(`user_id`) as user_count ..." ...

if ($result['user_count'])

0 and '0' are both false in PHP, so this does what you're looking for very concisely.

Have a look at: Comparison Operators

<?php

0=='0'; // true
0==='0' // false

0!='0'; // false
0!=='0'; // true

?>

in your case it doesn't matter since you are only using one =

use mysqli_fetch_row instead of mysqli_fetch_assoc.

$result = mysqli_fetch_row($query);
if ($result[0] != 0){
    // your code
}