Question

Q: Does a colon : in an array key have any special significance?

From the manual:

An array can be created by the array() language construct. It takes as parameters any number of comma-separated key => value pairs.

array(  key =>  value
     , ...
     )

While I was investigating what the Exception Object is set to, I created an error condition and put this line in-

print_r($ex);

Then in the web page produced looked at the source and it produces output like this-

Exception Object

(

[message:protected] => DB connection error: SQLSTATE[28000] [1045] Access denied for user 'test'@'localhost' (using password: YES)

[string:Exception:private] => 

Is the colon : in [message:protected] significant or is the key to the key => value pair literally message:protected ?

Answer 1

What you have there is print_rs representation of the exception object’s properties. These aren’t accessible with array notation unless the class implements ArrayAccess and the property is public.

As a further note, if you had an array like this…

$array = array(
    'my:key' => 'my:value'
);

… you can access the value as you normally would with $array['my:key']