Bug #55032 [Com]: Treating null, boolean and numbers as arrays does not trigger an error

Edit report at http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=55032&edit=1 ID: 55032 Comment by: cagret at gmail dot com Reported by: cagret at gmail dot com Summary: Treating null, boolean and numbers as arrays does not trigger an error Status: Duplicate Type: Bug Package: Variables related Operating System: Linux, Windows PHP Version: 5.3.6 Block user comment: N Private report: N New Comment: What is the logic of keeping this bug as intended behavior? You do the opposite thing to undefined array indexes by showing an error, but here you do not do such thing. What is worse is that $array['no_such_key'] is a valid code even if there is no such key, but $true['asdf'] where $true is a boolean is just nonsense. Do you want some real life examples of why this behavior generates many of bugs in our code and makes our life harder? Do you even understand the problem? Previous Comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2011-06-14 17:15:55] cagret at gmail dot com Thank you for reading my comment with understanding. We have an option to ignore/show E_NOTICE errors of undefined array indexes by setting error_reporting, why can't we have an option for not ignoring this behaviour? That could be easily fixed with no problems to backward compatibility, making it a behavior of E_STRICT or we could add an another E_ option for this. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2011-06-14 15:51:14] aharvey@php.net This is intended behaviour, per bug #41195. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2011-06-13 19:14:44] cagret at gmail dot com If implementing it is a performance problem (can't think of any other reason why it still hasn't been fixed), then you could at least give us an option, for example a php.ini option "check_types" that would be checking for such error. That would allow us to enable this option on Developer machines during testings and hopefully we would catch and fix all of these errors before uploading the code to the Production machine. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2011-06-11 02:19:47] cagret at gmail dot com Description: ------------ This bug is really annoying and generates many headeaches to millions of php developers. It's really hard to detect this bug sometimes, and that is because we have so much faith in PHP and we think that it's not possible that php would allow us to write such a nonsensical code and not throw an error, after all didn't we set the most strict error reporting you allow us to set? This example code should be self explanatory: <?php error_reporting(-1); // The most strict error reporting. $n = null; echo $n[12]; // That should generate at least a E_NOTICE or E_STRICT warning. $f = false; echo $f[12]; // No error. $t = true; echo $t[12]; // No error, again. $a = 4; echo $a[12]; // Oh really, again no error? What a surprise! $a = 4.44; echo $a[12]; // And what do you think?! Guess! No error! ?> Please fix it ASAP. Thank you for your time. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Edit this bug report at http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=55032&edit=1