Re:A look at modern PHP
by thaumaturgy on Tuesday May 05, 2020 @01:21PM
(#23082412)
It's a real-life problem. I just recently stepped in it while working on some software that interfaces with imap. A couple of folders were named "2018" and "2019" and common array*() operations kept blowing up with those keys.
There are native-php workarounds and if you're very very careful you can probably maybe encounter this and code around it without triggering any of the strange behaviors, but it's a minefield.
I'm not new to PHP, either. I think by chance people just usually don't encounter the circumstances for this particular bad behavior, but when it happens, it's really bad. Array keys shouldn't be getting implicitly typecasted.
I ended up building out a whole new array class to work around it. The notes at the top of my class file pretty well describe the problem: https://github.com/robsheldon/asinius-core/blob/master/src/A...
There are native-php workarounds and if you're very very careful you can probably maybe encounter this and code around it without triggering any of the strange behaviors, but it's a minefield.
I'm not new to PHP, either. I think by chance people just usually don't encounter the circumstances for this particular bad behavior, but when it happens, it's really bad. Array keys shouldn't be getting implicitly typecasted.