Validating 32-bit Integers using PHP

Last week I was required to validate that a supplied integer would fit correctly into a 32-bit address space. The available size of an integer within PHP is platform dependent, and could either be 32 or 64 bits based on the architecture you are using. This function had to cater for these differences and as such I decided to explore a couple of different options for producing this validation.

function is_32bit_signed_int($value)
{
    $options = ['min_range' => -2147483647, 'max_range' => 2147483647];

    return false !== filter_var($value, FILTER_VALIDATE_INT, compact('options'));
}

The first implementation uses the filter_var function to validate that the provided input can be correctly coerced into an integer. So as to apply the size restrictions, we make sure that the value is bounded within the range that a valid signed 32-bit integer can hold.

function is_32bit_signed_int($value)
{
    return (abs($value) & 0x7FFFFFFF) === abs($value);
}

The first solution works well but I wished to explore how would I go about performing this operation using a form of bitmask. Taking into consideration how PHP represents negative values (using two’s complement) and endianness we bitmask the absolute representation of the value within the max size that a signed 32-bit can handle. If this value is identical to the absolute representation without the bitmask applied then we can be assured that the value is able to correctly fit into a 32-bit integer.