During my upgrade to dotclear2, I noticed some notices about ""Indirect modification of overloaded property" and thought they are minor (notices…) and can be somehow ignored, bad idea

It seems that the known issues with setter/getters with array are more serious than I thought, being not really a fan of these magic methods, especially not for arrays or other non scalar data, I did not really "care", selber schuld

In the case of dotclear, the workaround is relatively easy:

<br />
class context<br />
{
  public $stack = array();</p>
 
  public function __set($name,$var)
  {
    $this->stack[$name] = $var;
  }
 
  public function __get($name)
  {
    if (!isset($this->stack[$name])) {
      return null;
    }
    return $this->stack[$name];
  }
}
 
	<p>$ctx = new context;<br />
$ctx->comment_preview = array();<br />
$ctx->comment_preview[&#8216;content&#8217;] = &#8216;&#8217;;<br />
$ctx->comment_preview[&#8216;rawcontent&#8217;] = &#8216;&#8217;;<br />
$ctx->comment_preview[&#8216;name&#8217;] = &#8216;&#8217;;<br />
$ctx->comment_preview[&#8216;mail&#8217;] = &#8216;&#8217;;<br />
$ctx->comment_preview[&#8216;site&#8217;] = &#8216;&#8217;;<br />
$ctx->comment_preview[&#8216;preview&#8217;] = false;<br />
$ctx->comment_preview[&#8216;remember&#8217;] = false;<br />
var_dump($ctx);</p>
 
	<p>$comment_preview = array();<br />
$comment_preview[&#8216;content&#8217;] = &#8216;&#8217;;<br />
$comment_preview[&#8216;rawcontent&#8217;] = &#8216;&#8217;;<br />
$comment_preview[&#8216;name&#8217;] = &#8216;&#8217;;<br />
$comment_preview[&#8216;mail&#8217;] = &#8216;&#8217;;<br />
$comment_preview[&#8216;site&#8217;] = &#8216;&#8217;;<br />
$comment_preview[&#8216;preview&#8217;] = false;<br />
$comment_preview[&#8216;remember&#8217;] = false;<br />
$ctx->comment_preview = $comment_preview;<br />
var_dump($ctx);<br />
 

The first initialiation will raise notices and fails (do not assign anything, as the error message says), the second works like a charm. This bug just confirms what I think about all these magic methods, don’t use them for non scalar unless someone put a gun on you.

The issue is known (thanks tony for the info). It is certainly due to the read/write access required by the array element change, but I do not know exactly how userland getter/setter work. I reopen an old bug (#36214), let see what will come out of it.