It appears that eval() does not handle mutli-dimentional arrays properly e.g.

$page[title] = 'Page';
$test = '$page[title]';

If I do:

eval( 'echo "'.$test.'";' );

I get:

Page

as the output, however if I change $test to:

$test = '$GLOBALS[page][title]';

then do:

eval( 'echo "'.$test.'";' );

I get:

Array[title]

as my output.

My best guess for the reason this is happening is that when eval() does a lookup for a variable in the symbol table it is going from top to bottom and stops on the first match, no matter how complete - From this I am assuming that the symbol table would be built as follows:

$GLOBALS
$GLOBALS[page]
$GLOBALS[page][title]

so if eval() searched from the top then it would find a partial match against $GLOBALS[page] which is what I think it is doing.

A better example:

    $page[title] = 'Hello';

    $string = '$page[title]';
    eval( 'echo "'.$string.'";' );

    echo "<br>\n";

    $string = '$GLOBALS[page][title]';
    eval( 'echo "'.$string.'";' );


I hope I make sense to you, if not then please let me know and I will try and be clearer.