variant variant class
&reftitle.intro; The VARIANT is COM's equivalent of the PHP zval; it is a structure that can contain a value with a range of different possible types. The variant class provided by the COM extension allows you to have more control over the way that PHP passes values to and from COM.
&reftitle.classsynopsis; variant variant &Methods;
variant examples variant example "; print "The value is " . $v . "
"; ?> ]]>
When returning a value or fetching a variant property, the variant is converted to a PHP value only when there is a direct mapping between the types that would not result in a loss of information. In all other cases, the result is returned as an instance of the variant class. You can force PHP to convert or evaluate the variant as a PHP native type by using a casting operator explicitly, or implicitly casting to a string by printing it. You may use the wide range of variant functions to perform arithmetic operations on variants without forcing a conversion or risking a loss of data. See also variant_get_type.
&reference.com.entities.variant;