Inspectopedia
 
2024.3

Dangerous array initialization

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Last modified: 03 December 2024

Reports dangerous array initializations (such as $arr[] = value).

This practice is discouraged because if $arr already contains some value (for example, a string from a request variable), then this value will stay in place and [] may actually stand for string access operator. It is always preferable to initialize a variable by direct assignment.

See Creating/modifying with square bracket syntax (php.net) for details.