Just for fun, trying to understand the definition of "returns parsable string"....any type of variable passed to var_export, the return value will be a typecasted as string...
<?php
$var = 1;
var_dump($var); //type is int as expected
echo "<br>";
$var_after_export = var_export($var,true); //returning $var will now makes it a string
var_dump($var_after_export);
?>