php syntax, arrays and errors

Question

Why does the following code give me an error in php?:

$b = array("1" => "2")["1"];

Error I get is Parse error...

Help.

Answer 1

Couple things. You can't pull immediately from arrays during creation, and keys of numerical values are automatically converted to integers, even if they're intended to be strings.

Answer 2

Unfortunately, in PHP, you need to do this:

$a = array("1" => "2");
$b = $a["1"];

It feels like your example should work because it does in other languages. But this is just the way PHP is.

Answer 3

You can use a function to do this for you:

function Get($array, $key, $default = false)
{
    if (is_array($array) === true)
    {
     settype($key, 'array');

     foreach ($key as $value)
     {
      if (array_key_exists($value, $array) === false)
      {
       return $default;
      }

      $array = $array[$value];
     }

     return $array;
    }

    return $default;
}

And use it like this:

$b = Get(array("1" => "2"), "1"); // 2

If you don't need to access multi-dimensional arrays you can also use this shorter function:

function Get($array, $key, $default = false)
{
    if (is_array($array) === true)
    {
     return (array_key_exists($value, $array) === true) ? $array[$value] : $default;
    }

    return $default;
}