Question

Possible Duplicate:
PHP String in Array Only Returns First Character

I’ve got following problem. When I run script below I got string(1) “F” as an output. How is that possible? No error, notice displayed.. nothing. Key whatever doesn’t exist in $c. Can you explain that?

   <?php
   $c = 'FEEDBACK_REGISTER_ACTIVATION_COMPLETED_MSG';
   var_dump ($c['whatever']);
   ?>

I’m having this issue on PHP 5.3.3. (LINUX)

Answer 1

PHP lets you index on strings:

$str = "Hello, world!";
echo $str[0]; // H
echo $str[3]; // l

PHP also converts strings to integers implicitly, but when it fails, uses zero:

$str = "1";
echo $str + 1; // 2
$str = "invalid";
echo $str + 1; // 1

So what it’s trying to do is index on the string, but the index is not an integer, so it tries to convert the string to an integer, yielding zero, and then it’s accessing the first character of the string, which happens to be F.