Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:91203
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Received-SPF: unknown (pb1.pair.com: domain php.net does not designate 212.27.42.2 as permitted sender)
To: Christoph Becker <cmbecker69@gmx.de>, Yasuo Ohgaki <yohgaki@ohgaki.net>,
 Stanislav Malyshev <smalyshev@gmail.com>
References: <56A3A01F.1020500@php.net> <56BB4A5F.3060906@php.net>
 <56BC29C8.9070308@gmail.com>
 <CAGa2bXaJ1dphqr8MXWXtUkicx1eP-o21SLQtf_MxoVb2o823wg@mail.gmail.com>
 <56BC3372.1010308@gmail.com>
 <CAGa2bXbWnLkp3mfQBNbOxJxy8U0hNBA7e_RbiekJrfC4YFEgbg@mail.gmail.com>
 <56BC7BB6.6070705@gmx.de>
Cc: Internals <internals@lists.php.net>
Message-ID: <56BC86FD.7040307@php.net>
Date: Thu, 11 Feb 2016 14:05:01 +0100
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101
 Thunderbird/38.5.1
MIME-Version: 1.0
In-Reply-To: <56BC7BB6.6070705@gmx.de>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Generalize support of negative string offsets
From: francois@php.net (=?UTF-8?Q?Fran=c3=a7ois_Laupretre?=)

Le 11/02/2016 13:16, Christoph Becker a écrit :
>
> Appending to an array always adds a single element only, consider
>
>    $a = [1,2,3];
>    $a[] = [4,5];
>
> The suggested syntax for strings would concatenate an arbitrary amount
> of elements (characters) to a string.  IMHO, this would not be
> consistent, but rather confusing.  The alternative interpretation to
> append the first character only, would be confusing as well (besides
> there would be issues with regard to multibyte character encodings).
>

Not exactly, the '$str[]' syntax I suggested would have worked the same 
as '$str[strlen($str)]': it would have appended the first character 
only. Concerns about multi-bytes characters are clearly out of scope, as 
all string offset operations handle bytes only.

Regarding consistency, I understand the arguments about the fact that 
string concatenation should be done using the '.' operator, but do you 
know that this is already supported :

$str="abc";
$str[3]='def';  // $str="abcd"
$str[10]='xyz'; // $str = "abc       x";

So, my feeling was that, since '$str[strlen($str)]' is supported, we 
*already* support concatenation using string offset syntax. So, 
supporting '[]' and '{}' as a shortcut for '[strlen($str)]' was just a 
small addition for a better consistency and a more intuitive behavior.

Stas and Yasuo are both right. It is not exactly related to negative 
string offsets but, on the other side, I probably won't bother opening 
an RFC for such a small change. That's why, if there had been a 
consensus, I would have added it to the current RFC.

Regards

François