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To: Ilia Alshanetsky <ilia@prohost.org>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Negative string offset support
From: alan@akbkhome.com (Alan Knowles)

echo $a{strlen($a)-1}; ? is that really that bad.

I do worry that at present
$a = "a string";
$p = 0
while( $p < strlen($p) )
   .. do stuff that could do $p-- or $p++ ....
   echo $a{$p};
}

at present that would produce a nice error if you went < 0.. easy to 
spot.. - if -ve was supported it could do unexpected stuff..

Regards
Alan

Ilia Alshanetsky wrote:

> I am wondering what are people's opinions on adding support for 
> negative string offsets that could be used to access data from the end 
> of a string.
>
> Ex. $a = "123"; echo $a[-1]; // would print 3
>
> I don't think we should do this for arrays, since -1 and similar are 
> valid array keys, which means adding this support for arrays would 
> break BC.
>
> Ilia
>