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From: Meredith Montgomery <mmontgomery@levado.to>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.php
Subject: Re: php 7.4: null["key"]
Date: Sun, 29 May 2022 23:13:42 -0300
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Meredith Montgomery <mmontgomery@levado.to> writes:

> I'm upgrading code to PHP 7.4, which will now blow a notice for things
> such as
>
>   null["key"]
>   (1.2)["key"]
>   (123)["key"]
>
> All of these seem to reduce to null.  (The footnote explains why I think
> so.)
>
> I have a lot of code which could be depending on such things.  I'd like
> to rewrite such code, but I have no idea how to find such code.  I
> suppose a loop such as
>
>   while ($a["key"]) { ... }
>
> could be depending on $a sometimes being null or even being undefined
> (because ``$a === null'' when $a is undefined).  (These are very weird
> things about PHP to my way of looking at things.)
>
> How would you search for something like that?  I just have no idea.  My
> best idea is to just watch a log of errors and notices and try to spot
> the code that way.

I guess nobody had much to say here.  I'm tackling easier problems at
first, but I will eventually have to come back to this and make some
decision.  I suppose upgrading to PHP 7.4 and watching the a noisy log
with error_reporting = E_ALL (say) might give me more information.  But,
of course, I have no way of running every line of code, so there is
really no obvious strategy for something like that.