Folks:
I came across a subtle bug a developer introduced into our application.
It took us a month to realize the bug was there because PHP didn't throw a
notice. Here is a simplified version of what was happening.
// function some_func() {}
$a = some_func();
if ($a['do_something'] == true) {
// Do it.
}
some_func() was supposed to return an array. But it was returning void.
So $a was NULL. Oops -- we all make mistakes. What's unfortunate is PHP
didn't raise a "Notice: Undefined index: do_something" here. It would
have saved us some headaches. I'm sure others have run into this as well.
The following also doesn't produce a notice:
$a = 12;
echo $a['k']
I looked through the bugs database and mailing list archive and came up
with nothing on this particular issue. But bugs 29271, 30885 and 38165
cover the situation where a key's string is auto-converted to 0:
// While this is a behavior we all truly expect:
$a = 'value';
echo $a[0] . "\n"; // output: v
// Another oddity, but people closing bugs say it's expected:
$a = 'value';
echo $a['k'] . "\n"; // output: v
This last behavior is counter-intuitive, let alone un-documented.
Wondering what the folks here think about this.
Thanks,
--Dan
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