A small remark from what I tried:
- if you use prepared statements with bind_param and your query looks like
"SELECT user_id FROM users WHERE ... = ?" and then you bind an integer param to this, the user_ids you get will be casted to int. On the other hand, if you don't use prepared statements, but sth like "SELECT user_id FROM users WHERE ... = $var", where $var is an int, and just make the query, the fetched results will be strings. (e.g., at var_dump, ["user_id"]=> string(1) "6" for some row)
This is just from what I observed in my project, hope it's correct.
