Bug #12190: Differnt versions (4.0.4 and 4.0.6) have different character case rules

From: kerrorr@em.agr.ca Operating system: MS NT 4.0 build 1381 PHP version: 4.0.6 PHP Bug Type: Website problem Bug description: Differnt versions (4.0.4 and 4.0.6) have different character case rules I am not sure if this is a bug or a feature or what, but for feedback purposes, herewith my tale of sorrow and angst. We had version 4.0.4 installed on our NT server (4.0 build 1381, Microsoft-IIS/4.0) when it crashed last week (from a surfeit of scratch files in C:/TEMP - we don't know why yet, but we have our suspicions) and this led our sysop to a rebuild of the system. Whilst doing that, we installed version 4.0.6 using the Win32 installer. This led to one of our scripts - located in an include file "footer.incl" which takes a META tag defined in the calling PHTML file <META NAME="Date_of_last_modification" CONTENT="20010126"> and breaks it apart and displays it. The script broke under 4.0.6 because the footer.incl file referenced the variable thus: $datevar = $datearr["date_of_last_modification"]; Changing that to follow the capitalization of the variable name as in the META statement (i.e. to read Date_of_last_modification) fixed the problem. However, for some reason, some pages on our server started hanging the server. Apparently, the problem pages do nothing more than display static information and call the same four include files as other similar pages which appeared to work fine. Since this was the second day of down time, we decided to resolve it by copying version 4.0.4r over the existing installation. (Why does 4.0.6 have an installer and 4.0.4 didn't?) That resolved the hanging problem but the date routine broke again. This time changing the code in the include file back to all lower case worked!?! We will change all of our meta tags to all lowercase to work around this - which should work. But the question I have is what are the rules of character case? I've been hunting around in my reference material but haven't found an answer. -- Edit bug report at: http://bugs.php.net/?id=12190&edit=1