Question

I am trying to get a value from an array, but when I use $array[0], I get a PHP notice ‘Undefined Offset: 0’. However, when I use $array['id'] (should be the same as using ‘0’, since ‘id’ is the first key in the array), I am able to get the value. I did a print_r and this was outputted:

Array ( 
     [id] => 1 
     [username] => test 
)

Shouldn’t I be able to get the key using its index? I believe it was working earlier, but I don’t know what I could have done to make it stop working. Any ideas?

Answer 1

No, you shouldn’t be able to do this.

You might be thinking of arrays obtained from something like mysql_fetch_array, which, by default, lets you use both numeric and string indexes to get to the columns – but the reason you can do that is because the array contains both of those.

You can also use array_values to extract values from an array to essentially transform the indexes to numeric ones, but it’s not the same thing, really.