I had a problem with PHP 5.0.5 somehow resetting a sub-array of an array with no apparent reason. The problem was in doing a foreach() on the parent array PHP was making a copy of the subarrays and in doing so it was resetting the internal pointers of the original array.
The following code demonstrates the resetting of a subarray:
<?
$a = array(
'a' => array(
'A', 'B', 'C', 'D',
),
'b' => array(
'AA', 'BB', 'CC', 'DD',
),
);
// Set the pointer of $a to 'b' and the pointer of 'b' to 'CC'
reset($a);
next($a);
next($a['b']);
next($a['b']);
next($a['b']);
var_dump(key($a['b']));
foreach($a as $k => $d)
{
}
var_dump(key($a['b']));
?>
The result of the two var dumps are 3 and 0, respectively. Clearly the internal pointer of $a['b'] was reset by doing the foreach loop over $a.
Each time the foreach loop iterated over the 'a' and 'b' keys of $a it made a copy of $a['a'] and $a['b'] into $d which resetted the internal pointers of $a['a'] and $a['b'] despite making no obvious changes.
The solution is instead to iterate over the keys of $a.
<?
foreach(array_keys($a) as $k)
{
}
?>
and using $a[$k] (or creating an alias of $a[$k] as $d and dealing with the consequences of using aliases).
For the curious, I was implementing the Iterator interface on a dummy object and calling a global object to do the actual iteration (also to cope with PHP's lack of C-style pointers which when doing a $a = $b on objects would cause the data in $a to be inconsistent with the data in $b when modified). Being that I had many dummy objects representing different data sets I chose to store each data set as a subarray contained within the global object. To make this work each dummy object has to store a key (which can freely be duplicated without problems) that it passes to the global object when rewind, key, current, next, and valid were called on the dummy object.
Unfortunately for me, my key required to be more than just a simple string or number (if it was then it could be used to directly index the subarray of data for that object and problem avoided) but was an array of strings. Instead, I had to iterate over (with a foreach loop) each subarray and compare the key to a variable stored within the subarray.
So by using a foreach loop in this manner and with PHP resetting the pointer of subarrays it ended up causing an infinite loop.
Really, this could be solved by PHP maintaining internal pointers on arrays even after copying.