Question

In PHP is it posible to have an array where a string was previously stored?

echo "valuebefore: ".$_SESSION['REQUEST_TOKEN'][TL_MODE];
$_SESSION['REQUEST_TOKEN'][TL_MODE] = "somestring";

echo "typebefore: ".gettype($_SESSION['REQUEST_TOKEN'][TL_MODE]);
$_SESSION['REQUEST_TOKEN'][TL_MODE] = array();

echo "typeafter: ".gettype($_SESSION['REQUEST_TOKEN'][TL_MODE]);
if (!is_array($_SESSION['REQUEST_TOKEN'][TL_MODE]))
{
  echo "is not an array";
}
echo "valueafter: ".$_SESSION['REQUEST_TOKEN'][TL_MODE];

and the output is:

valuebefore: A
typebefore: string 
typeafter: string   << the type didnt change to array!
is not an array
valueafter: A       << the value was not updated!

Why can’t it just hold the new array?
How come the value has not changed either?

Edit:

Here is the vardump for other variables involved:

echo var_dump(TL_MODE)." <br/>";
echo var_dump($_SESSION['REQUEST_TOKEN'])." <br/>";
echo var_dump($_SESSION['REQUEST_TOKEN'][TL_MODE])." <br/>";

output:

string(2) "FE"
string(32) "A96665c9f1e41d1745bf3a3d75cff33a"
string(1) "A"

Answer 1

@Brent Baisley is right on that $_SESSION[‘REQUEST_TOKEN’] is not an array it’s a string, but the base problem turned out to be a cookie related issue that was corrupting the $_SESSION data.

As soon as I cleared cookies and cache in the web browser all worked fine.