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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-24T04:06:39+00:00

I have an array of names which I am reading in from a mysql

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I have an array of names which I am reading in from a mysql table. Everything works fine, except I’ve just noticed that if the name contains any non-English characters, e.g. Scandanavian, Greek etc. this causes an error, “undefined index”.

What I don’t get though is that the names are being listed out fine in another part of my app, using the same function. The only difference being that I am passing the name specifically as a parameter when this error occurs. Other times I am just iterating through the whole list and echoing out all the names.

Each name is the array key, I’m getting the error on the line for the else return: 

   if($nameParam ==""){ 
         return $listOfNames;
   }
   else{ 
         return $listOfNames[$nameParam];   
   }

Any ideas how I could fix this?

Would it be better to somehow check each name and apply some kind of encoding/decoding writing/reading to the mysql table? If so what would be the best way to do this?
Thanks..

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I’ve looked through PHP C code for if PHP does modifies/strips unicode chars in array key strings in any way but couldn’t find any conversion logic there.
    Just to confirm this I’ve asked a question on php.net mailing list:

    Q:
    ….blah blah…I was just wondering – when unicode characteres are used in
    array key – does PHP strips them or affects them in any way?
    or does PHP simply treats keys as binary string, the end of the story?

    A:
    I believe that string array keys are treated as binary strings, and
    never modified. I couldn’t find you a source, but I’ve always worked on
    this assumption and never hit a problem. UTF-8 keys definitely work fine
    (*); I’m also not aware of any max length the keys can have (meaning you
    shouldn’t have to worry about a multi-byte character getting truncated
    in the middle).

    Thus I now believe that having whatever UTF8 characters in array keys shouldn’t affect your ability to use arrays as usual.

    ALSO

    I’m sure you already aware of this but I would check that db uses correct encoding to store data.
    In mysql I always use UTF-8 charset and utf8_general_ci collation.

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