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can you include a short script?

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Btw, this happens when you do:

print "a foo $bar['blah'] eh";

Don't do that.  You can do either:

print "a foo {$bar['blah']} eh";
print "a foo $bar[blah] eh";
print "a foo " . $bar['blah'] . " eh";

But when outside of strings always quote your keys:

print $bar[blah];   // bad
print $bar['blah']; // good

Unless of course you defined blah as a constant earlier.  Anyway I'm making a faq out of this question and marking as a doc bug because this question comes up a lot especially since 4.1.0 (autoglobals) and 4.2.0 (register_globals default change).

The string type description includes a lengthy explanation of this AFAIK.

As it turns out, the string docs are wrong and contain the following in the example:


// This is wrong for the same reason
// as $foo[bar] is wrong outside a string. 
echo "This is wrong: {$arr[foo][3]}";


I'll rewrite this part of the documention too.  $foo[bar] is perfectly fine inside strings, CONSTANTS aren't seen in strings.  Anyway, this will be further explained with a more specific example too.  And a faq entry :)  This question comes up waaaaaaay too much these days.

Philip, please do not change that part of the documentation. **It is correct!**.

Try with this script:

<?php

error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set("display_errors", TRUE);

$arr['foo'][3] = 14;

echo "This is wrong: {$arr[foo][3]}";
echo "This is good: {$arr['foo'][3]}";

?>

For the first echo line, a NOTICE error is
echoed out... So the documentation is correct. It may not be clear enough, but it is correct, the example is right.

Sort of.  This is a feature I was not aware of in PHP and imho is sort of a bug :)  

As it turns out, constants are only seen in strings if:

a) It's an array key
b) {braces} are around the array

So for example, NO E_NOTICE is generated from "a $arr[foo]"  but "a {$arr[foo]}" does!  And btw, "a {foo}" does not look for the constant foo.

And because multidimensional arrays inside strings require {braces} this is an important point.  IMHO this behavior of constants inside strings is inconsistent and I'm writing php-dev now! :)

Thanks for the report, the documentation has been updated here:
http://cvs.php.net/cvs.php/phpdoc/en/language/types.xml

On a related note, this may end up not being a parse error in the future.  The documentation will be updated once a verdict is made on bug #21820 so hold tight :)