Here is a really useful undocumented feature:
You can have it automatically deduce the base of the number from the prefix of the string using the same syntax as integer literals in PHP ("0x" for hexadecimal, "0" for octal, non-"0" for decimal) by passing a base of 0 to intval():
<?php
echo intval("0x1a", 0), "\n"; // hex; prints "26"
echo intval("057", 0), "\n"; // octal; prints "47"
echo intval("42", 0), "\n"; // decimal; prints "42"
?>