facebook connect api "Cannot use string offset as an array in" error

Question

Please help! I have been grappling with this error for days and I cannot for the life of me figure it out. I am using facebook connect and fetching a "contact_email" attribute using their api method users_getInfo.

The issue is that when I execute this PHP file, i get this error: "Cannot use string offset as an array in...". This error specifically refers to this line of code: $firstName=$user_details[0]['contact_email'];

I'm thinking this is because the user_getInfo method is not returning any results... However, the most ridiculous part about all this is that, I can execute the code below several dozens of times in a row SUCCESSFULLY without the above error, BUT THEN randomly without changing ANY code at all, I will suddenly encounter this error, in which case it will begin to give me an error several dozens of times, and then AGAIN without any code change, start executing successfully again.

This odd behavior occurs regardless of the attribute i am fetching.. (contact_email, first_name, last_name, etc.). I am running php 5.2.11. Is there something I'm missing??

Please Help!

include_once 'site/fbconnect/config.php'; //has $api_key and $secret defined. include_once 'site/facebook-platform/client/facebook.php'; global $api_key,$secret; $fb=new Facebook($api_key,$secret); $fb->require_login(); $fb_user=$fb->get_loggedin_user();

$user_details=$fb->api_client->users_getInfo($fb_user,array('last_name','first_name','contact_email'));
$email=$user_details[0]['contact_email']; $firstName=$user_details[0]['first_name']; $lastName=$user_details[0]['last_name'];

Answer 1

Using the facebook php client API I was also receiving that error but my error was related to checking if the users are friends using the friends_areFriends php method.

//$results_array = $facebook->api_client->friends_areFriends($fb_user, $selected_friend_uid); //$answer = $results_array[0]['are_friends'];

I would get this error when I assigned the $result, "Cannot use string offset as an array" and aparently the friends_areFriends method above was failing alot. My solution was to create a for loop that ran that code and then check $answer to see if it was an array using php method is_array() and executing the method call again if it wasn't. My loop was for 10 tries before just letting it fail. In the end, this check was severely degrating the performance of my facebook application. Instead, I removed the friends_areFriends api call alltogather and my facebook app performance was nice and fast again.

You could probably implement a similar feature allowing the method to retry itself if the result is not an array. The problem I think is on facebook's side, sometimes they are flooded and the requests do not complete successfully. I caution you not to retry more than 5 tries though because if you do a forever loop, rest assured they will ban you from the using the Facebook API for flooding it, so be careful.