I've been trying to get some user-defined functions to work in 4.0b3, and they all fail with variants of the following:

function rdfl($fname) {
   if ($fname = "") {
      return("No data");
   } else {
      return(readfile($fname));
   }
}

echo rdfl("/home/download/finger.inc");

This returns an error indicating no such file "". Which is TOTALLY bizzare since the $fname check should fail it then, but instead it drops into the readfile routine with a null string. What's up with that?

Another example:

function tstostr($timestamp,$fmt) {
   echo $timestamp . " (" . $fmt . ")";
   ...do some twiddling with regex...
   return(date($fmt,twiddled parameters));
}

echo tstostr($dbresult["dt"],"d/m/Y");

This echos out something along the following lines:

19992112 ()

Indicating the second parameter is empty, but even if I try to catch the empty parameter and replace with a default value, the paramter catch is ignored like there's data in the parameter, but anytime I try to manipulate the second parameter, I get a null string.