Greetings,
There is something weird with 7.1 and implicit strings to array
conversions, so I wanted to double check with you that the behaviour is
wanted (and perhaps the migration71 doc should be updated to reflect this.
So in the migration docs [1] you say that: " Applying the empty index
operator to a string (e.g. $str[] = $x) throws a fatal error instead of
converting silently to array. "
I'm going to show four cases on different PHP versions:
CASE 1: php -r '$a = "foo"; $a[] = "bar"; var_dump($a);'
PHP 5.6.x -> Fatal Error
PHP 7.0.x -> Fatal Error
PHP 7.1.x -> Fatal Error
CASE 2: php -r '$a = "foo"; $a["x"] = "baz"; var_dump($a);'
PHP 5.6.x -> string "boo" (with illegal offset warning)
PHP 7.0.x -> string "boo" (with illegal offset warning)
PHP 7.1.x -> string "boo" (with illegal offset warning)
CASE 3: php -r '$a = ""; $a["x"] = "bar"; var_dump($a);'
PHP 5.6.x -> array("x" => "bar") with NO warnings
PHP 7.0.x -> array("x" => "bar") with NO warnings
PHP 7.1.x -> string "b" with illegal offset warning
CASE 4: php -r '$a = ""; $a[] = "bar"; var_dump($a);'
PHP 5.6.x -> array("bar") with NO warnings
PHP 7.0.x -> array("bar") with NO warnings
PHP 7.1.x -> Fatal Error
I think what is bugging me here is that the docs talk about CASE 1 whose
behaviour actually did not change, so it should mention "empty string"
because that's where the actual change happened (CASE 4), also I think that
CASE 3 should be rethinked.
In general I would like to raise a concern on the fact that I think the
previous behaviour was better, after all PHP is dynamically typed so why
not allow a variable to silently change its value silently? We know that
using offset with strings is always illegal (CASE 2) so why not *always*
converting it to an array and discard its previous value?
[1]
http://php.net/manual/en/migration71.incompatible.php#migration71.incompatible.empty-string-index-operator
