On Wed, May 11, 2005 4:46 pm, Webmaster said: > I have an application that occasionally drops a session array element > value. > > $_SESSION['userData'] = $userData; > > this to happen? Has anyone else experienced this sort of occasional > anomaly? YES! Granted, in my case, it was a short-lived buglet in PHP, and it was more predictable because I was doing the same thing every time, but... Basically, what was happening in MY case was this: $foo = $_SESSION['foo']; This was putting a "string reference" (which doesn't even exist as a data type in PHP, but that's what it was in reality) into $foo. Then, later, in other processing, I might do: $foo = 'some other value than was was in $foo'; And, POOF! my value in $_SESSION['foo'] was altered! Because $foo was a "string reference" being passed back from the PHP code that pulled data out of $_SESSION. I filed a bug report at http://bugs.php.net, and it's labeled as "fixed in CVS" Short term, I just stopped re-using $foo as a variable name. It's entirely POSSIBLE that you have something similar going on. One tell-tale was that doing a var_dump($_SESSION) or var_dump($foo) would show something not un-like: &(string X) "foo data" where X is the string length, instead of just: (string X) "foo data" The tell-tale presence of & is what made me realize that I was somehow getting a "string reference" and that was messing with my data when I re-used variables. The annoying thing was that this made scrubbing my $_SESSION data difficult -- and I had people telling me that I should be copying stuff out of $_SESSION, but on a shared server, I don't trust $_SESSION data! So I want to copy it out to $foo, and do, say, a regex on it, and compare the result to the original $_SESSION['foo'] and if they don't match, I consider that data hacked/invalid, because I know it's supposed to be the same before/after this Regex. Yet, if the string is a reference, well, then, the Regex applied to the reference was getting applied to the $_SESSION element... Anyway, make a long story short, it was quite confusing and more than a little annoying to be trying to scrub data that was always a reference and kept changing out from under me when I used it. This may NOT be what's happening to you... Or it might be another manifestation of the same buglet. -- Like Music? http://l-i-e.com/artists.htm -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
