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To: Alan Knowles <alan@akbkhome.com>
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Date: Sun, 04 Dec 2011 17:55:42 +0100
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Fixing string offsets  of strings.
From: johannes@schlueters.de (Johannes =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Schl=FCter?=)

On Sun, 2011-12-04 at 00:08 +0800, Alan Knowles wrote:
> This patch is a start.
> https://bugs.php.net/patch-display.php?bug_id=60362&patch=first_effort_to_fix_this&revision=latest
> 
> It's been quite a while since I hacked on the engine, so the patch only 
> works reasonably well.. (see the FIXME on the tests at the bottom of the 
> patch.)
> 
> The patch changes the following:
>   * $s = "string";  $s['offset'] -- produces a warning (and returns an 
> empty string)
>   * $s = "string";  $s['1'] -- works as before..
>   * $s = "string";  $s[true] $s[false] $s[0.1] -- give a notice (cast it 
> to an int if you want to get rid of the notice) - however work as before.
>   * changes the warning on invalid indexes to say "Uninitialized or 
> invalid" rather than just "Uninitialized"
>   * fixes most of the related tests

I think it's bad to add another set of casting rules to the language.
I'd prefer splitting the string offset operator from array offset.


   $a = [0,1,2,3];
   $s = "string";

   $a{0}; // wrong
   $s{0}; // ok
   $a[0]; // ok
   $s[0]; // wrong

Yes, something like this has been discussed before, back and forth and
doing this is too late for 5.4, but let's look to 5.5.

johannes