Question

I’ve heard that you get an error if you try to access a key in a hash that doesn’t exist.

However, I seem to just get an empty string, or a null value.

Example:

<?php

$hash = array("abc" => 123,
              "def" => 456
);

echo "a key that's in the hash: <" . $hash["abc"] . "><br />";

echo "a key that's not in the hash: <" . $hash["ghi"] . ">";

?>

The output is:

a key that's in the hash: <123>
a key that's not in the hash: <>

What’s going on here?

I’m using PHP v5.3.8.

Answer 1

You are probably hiding your notice errors (more info here).
Put this at the top of your script:

error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set('display_errors', true);