You apparently have a boolean, so checking involes using

if (!$value)
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instead of

if ($value == 0)
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Mind you, the latter would work fine with !1 as well, so I don't see the problem.

If need to format it to print it, you can use the conditional operator.

print("value = ", $value?"true":"false", "\n");
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But there's no need to format it until it's time to output it.