Array Formation Issue - Read For Learn

There a few things going on here.

First, you’re getting back a multidimensional array (array of arrays) where the nested arrays have column names as keys. The reason for this is your use of the ARRAY_A parameter. You can read about the output types in the codex entry. You may be just fine using the default OBJECT. I’m going to answer as you have it though.

Second, the values of the nested arrays are SQL escaped strings.

This answer gives a good explanation as to why the result is escaped and suggests the stripslashes(); to fix it.

This answer gives a good explanation as to why strings come back instead of integers. It suggests typecasting or a PHP function but I would use the WordPress function absint() to make sure I had a non-negative integer.

So you could use something like this to achieve your desired outcome:

function wpsx_make_item_id_to_int($userGadgets) {
    //Init out collection array
    $item_id_ints = array();

    //Process parent array
    foreach ($userGadgets as $key => $array) {
        //Process nested arrays
        foreach ($array as $column_name => $column_value) {
            //$column_value is your item_ids
            if (is_string($column_value)) {
                //Make ID into int and add it to our colection
                $item_id_ints[] = absint(stripslashes($column_value));
            }
        }
    }
    //Return an associative array of (int)item_ids
    return $item_id_ints;
}

However are you sure you need to be using $wpdb in the first place? I find most of the time you can achieve what you need to by leveraging built in WordPress functionally and API’s with the added benefit of a bit more ease and security.

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