Question

I was going through a manual and found a statement saying “if array element used with ‘-‘ as the word separator, the array’s element can be accessed by magic quotes”.. but didn’t provided with any explanations on it. could some one explain the reason behind this?

Answer 1

It’s seemingly this one (since OP won’t tell us):
http://www.dagbladet.no/development/phpcodingstandard/#arrayelement

Here “magic quotes” is simply the wrong designation. They mean double quoted string interpolation, specifically:

print "$myarr[foo_bar] world"; 

versus

print "$myarr[foo-bar] world";   // invalid

And indeed only the first one is correct syntax. Else use curly braces and key quotes:

print "{$myarr['foo-bar']} world";