Req #52381 [Opn->Bgs]: You're doing the wrong thing with string accessors

Edit report at http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=52381&edit=1 ID: 52381 Updated by: aharvey@php.net Reported by: mbt at gator dot net Summary: You're doing the wrong thing with string accessors -Status: Open +Status: Bogus Type: Feature/Change Request Package: Unknown/Other Function Operating System: Linux PHP Version: 5.3.2 New Comment: This decision dates back the best part of five years at this stage to the developer meeting in November 2005. [0] It's come up a couple of times on the Internals mailing list since then -- both immediately after the developer meeting [1], and then to confirm the 5.3 migration document was correct. [2] To be blunt, the horse has already bolted on this. {} is deprecated, and [] is the supported way to access strings by offset both now and in the future. [0] http://www.php.net/~derick/meeting-notes.html#cleanup-for-vs [1] http://www.mail-archive.com/internals@lists.php.net/msg18638.html [2] http://www.mail-archive.com/internals@lists.php.net/msg42883.html Previous Comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2010-07-20 01:53:12] mbt at gator dot net Description: ------------ I should have made more fuss about this earlier, but here it is now. I think you are taking exactly the wrong approach to addressing single characters in strings. I am of the very strong opinion that the direct addressing of characters in strings have an obvious syntactic difference from the addressing of array elements. This means you should keep {} and deprecate [] for addressing characters in strings. PHP is not C!! In C, strings are arrays, so [] is the preferred C operator to address single bytes (or character codes) in a string. In PHP, strings are a primitive type; they are not arrays. The notation $foo{0} makes it plain that $foo is a string, not an array and that you are accessing a byte, not an array element. Making this obvious through the syntax is more important than you might think. Imagine $bar to be a 3x3 array of strings. In this case, what are you to assume when you see in the middle of a script, far away from the assignment to $bar, when you read $baz = $bar[$a][$b][$c]; If you have instead $baz = $bar[$a][$b]{$c}; you know you're not doing ordinary array addressing. These issues become important for the people who have to maintain the code. Consider two more ways confusion can arise because strings are not arrays. If $abc is a string, $d = $abc[2]; works but $abc[2] = array('boo'); fails. The elements of a string "array" do not work like true array elements. Indices to strings must be integers; unlike arrays, strings do not allow associative indices. This fails: $abc['key'] = 'def'; I believe that indicating single-byte access via [] is such a bad idea that if you're dead set on removing {}, I would prefer to deprecate that kind of access altogether in favor of substr() and friends. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Edit this bug report at http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=52381&edit=1