What is the difference between the | and || operators in php?

In PHP, the | operator is a bitwise OR operator, while the || operator is a logical OR operator.

The bitwise OR operator performs a bit-level OR operation on two operands. It compares each bit of the first operand to the corresponding bit of the second operand and returns a new value where each bit is set to 1 if either corresponding bit is 1, and 0 otherwise.

The logical OR operator returns true if either operand is truthy, and false otherwise.

Here are a few examples to illustrate the difference between the two operators:

$a = 5; // 0101 in binary
$b = 3; // 0011 in binary
echo $a | $b; // Outputs: 7 (0111 in binary)
echo $a || $b; // Outputs: 1

$c = 0;
$d = 1;
echo $c | $d; // Outputs: 1
echo $c || $d; // Outputs: 1

In general, you should use the logical OR operator (||) to test for boolean conditions, and the bitwise OR operator (|) to perform bit-level operations. However, it is important to note that the logical OR operator has a higher precedence than the bitwise OR operator, so you may need to use parentheses to specify the order of evaluation in some cases.

For example:

$a = 5;
$b = 3;
if ($a | $b == 1) {