Simon Neaves was close on explaining why his function is perfect choice for testing for an int (as possibly most people would need).  He made some errors on his ctype_digit() output though - possibly a typo, or maybe a bug in his version of PHP at the time.

The correct output for parts of his examples should be:

<?php
var_dump(ctype_digit(23)); //bool(false)
var_dump(ctype_digit("23")); //bool(true)
var_dump(ctype_digit(23.5)); //bool(false)
var_dump(ctype_digit(NULL)); //bool(false)
var_dump(ctype_digit("")); //bool(false)
?>

As you can see, the reason why using *just* ctype_digit() may not always work is because it only returns TRUE when given a string as input - given a number value and it returns FALSE (which may be unexpected).