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Doc Bug #71598 Whitespace at the start of a function name counts as part of the function name.
Submitted: 2016-02-15 12:48 UTC Modified: 2016-02-15 13:16 UTC
Votes:1
Avg. Score:2.0 ± 0.0
Reproduced:1 of 1 (100.0%)
Same Version:0 (0.0%)
Same OS:0 (0.0%)
From: lucas at lucassifoni dot info Assigned:
Status: Open Package: Scripting Engine problem
PHP Version: 7.0.3 OS: Debian 8
Private report: No CVE-ID: None
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 [2016-02-15 12:48 UTC] lucas at lucassifoni dot info 
Description:
------------
According to the PHP doc, «A valid function name starts with a letter or underscore, followed by any number of letters, numbers, or underscores.»

Some whitespace characters, like U+2000, U+2001, U+2002, U+2003, U+2004 [...], and the zero-width non breaking space (now word joiner, U+FEFF), are interpreted as a part of a function name.

If this isn't a problem with a proper code editor that highlights "special" whitespace, it is still conflicting with the doc, and can be really confusing to users.

The given snippet has a zero-width nonbreaking space just in front of foo(). When invoking foo(), the function is undefined, since the space is part of its referenced name.

Test script:
---------------
<?php

function foo(){
    echo 'bar';
}

foo();

Expected result:
----------------
bar

Actual result:
--------------
Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function foo() in [...][...]:7 Stack trace: #0 {main} thrown in [...][...] on line 7

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 [2016-02-15 13:16 UTC] requinix@php.net
-Type: Bug +Type: Documentation Problem -Package: PHP Language Specification +Package: Scripting Engine problem
 [2016-02-15 13:16 UTC] requinix@php.net 
It then goes on to specify a regex: [a-zA-Z_\x7f-\xff][a-zA-Z0-9_\x7f-\xff]*

Given that files must be saved in an encoding, your zero-width non-breaking space was probably encoded using UTF-8, thus your function is named "\xEF\xBB\xBFfoo" - which is valid, though terribly inconvenient to write in actual code.

Rather than try to make PHP Unicode aware, something which has proven to be difficult in the past, for now perhaps we can update that one sentence to mention the high-byte range and how it consequently allows most non-ASCII characters (for better or worse) in names.
 [2016-06-27 11:47 UTC] lkppo at free dot fr 
I can reproduce the same problem with a variable substitution:

<?php

$aaa = "abcdefgh";
$bbb = " $aaa ";

?>

Inserting a non breaking space just after $aaa raises an error. Since most HTML pages are encoded in UTF-8, it is disconcerting that PHP avoid Unicode. Unicode will be hard but you can't avoid it, it is ubiquitous.
 
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