Array syntax question:

What's with $the['dot.']?

[bedlam]

Hiya folks,

As a self-taught err... 'programmer,'* I often find holes in my knowledge...I'm going through a piece of code in an effort to patch some of the holes, and I keep seeing essentially this construct:

$someVariable = $someOther['variable[b][4].[/4][/b]'];

I can see it's an array, but what's with the dot inside the quotes after the word "variable"?

-B

*This word meant to be understood in a way that carries no sense of 'expertise'... ;-)

[edit]I don't know what 'synatx' is either...[/edit]

[HelenDev]

I think the dot means it's appending the variable 'variable'

e.g
$myvar = "the cat";
$myvar.= " sat on the mat";

// $myvar = "the cat sat on the mat"

[bedlam]

Naw, I know about using the dot for concatenation in these kinds of syntax:

$variable = 'this' . ' and' . ' that';
$variable = 'this';
$variable .= ' and that';

I'm wondering about the syntax in the first post.

-B

[HelenDev]

I just figured it was the same thing.

I'm a self-taught err... 'programmer,' too ;)

[bedlam]

Hm. Well in fact, I have no good reason at all to think that you're wrong... It's just that in the code I'm looking at I can't tell if that's what it's doing or not...

-B

[jatar_k]

it doesn't really make much sense to me either ;)

I am not sure what they are trying to do, if you dump the array is that just an element/var name?

[ergophobe]

Based on the manual, an array index can be a string. That is, unlike a variable name, it seems that any string can be used as an array index. Without having tried it, it appears then that

$array['@48.']

is perfectly valid and doesn't mean anything special except that it is a different element than

$array['%[][][][.']

Obviously, if you take away the single quotes, you will get a fatal error.

Tom

[coopster]

Exactly. A key may be either an integer or a string [php.net], so the dot/period (.) is valid syntax. It can get pretty ugly sometimes, consider this...

mysql_query('SET @id =0;');  
$sql = 'SELECT @id := @id +1';  
$result = mysql_query($sql);  
$row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result); 
print_r($row); 
// returns: 
Array 
( 
 [@id := @id +1] => 1 
) 

Yuck. I like to keep my array names a bit more tidy and sensible, usually without any punctuation. But, to each their own...