[pmwiki-users] Irreproducible behavior - maybe a bug

[Joachim Durchholz]

Joachim Durchholz wrote:
> I've got a tentative prime suspect: the array cast. (In Markup(), it's 
> even error-suppressed using @, but that doesn't seem to enter into the 
> picture - I don't particularly like that use of @ though. It can mask 
> errors other than the expected ones, and then ugly things start to happen.)
> 
> I'll test that hypothesis shortly.

Yup, that's it.

Defined this function:

function to_array($a) {
   if (is_array($a))
     return $a;
   else
     return array();
}

and used it in Markup() like this:
       ...
       foreach(to_array(@$MarkupTable[$id]['dep']) as $i=>$m) {
       ...

Oh, and looking on http://www.php.net/language.types.type-juggling I 
found this:
"Note:  The behaviour of an automatic conversion to array is currently 
undefined."
In the light of this remark, I find the stability of PmWiki remarkable - 
after all, there are 64 occurrences of (array) in the PmWiki code. Seems 
like the conversion isn't *that* undefined, just long-standingly buggy 
and nobody ever cared to fix it...

Regards,
Jo