note 47240 deleted from language.types.array by googleguy

Note Submitter: Joe Morrison <jdm at powerframe dot com> ---- Programmers new to PHP may find the following surprising: <?php $x[1] = 'foo'; $x[0] = 'bar'; echo "Original array:\n"; var_dump($x); array_pop($x); echo "Array after popping last element:\n"; var_dump($x); ?> The surprise is that element 0 is deleted, not element 1. Apparently the notion of "last element" has more to do with how the array is stored internally than with which element has the highest numeric index. I recently translated a Perl program to PHP and was bitten by this one. My solution was to identify all the places in my code where I could prove that the array elements were assigned sequentially. In those cases it is safe to use array_pop, array_splice, etc. since the array indices correspond with the array layout. For the other cases, my solution was to write replacements for the built-in array functions such as this one: <?php function safe_pop(&$a) { if (!isset($a)) return; if (!is_array($a)) return; if (count($a) == 0) return; unset($a[max(array_keys($a))]); } ?>