What are some common pitfalls or challenges when dealing with automatic type conversions in PHP?

One common pitfall when dealing with automatic type conversions in PHP is that unexpected conversions can occur, leading to potential bugs or unintended behavior in your code. To avoid this, it's important to be aware of how PHP handles type conversions and to explicitly cast variables to the desired type when necessary.

// Example of explicitly casting a variable to a specific type
$number = "10";
$number = (int) $number; // Cast $number to an integer
echo $number; // Output: 10