Inspectopedia 2025.2 Help

Dangerous array initialization

Reports dangerous array initializations (such as $arr[] = value).

This practice is discouraged because if $arr already contains some value (for example, a string from a request variable), then this value will stay in place and [] may actually stand for string access operator. It is always preferable to initialize a variable by direct assignment.

See Creating/modifying with square bracket syntax (php.net) for details.

Locating this inspection

By ID

Can be used to locate inspection in e.g. Qodana configuration files, where you can quickly enable or disable it, or adjust its settings.

PhpDangerousArrayInitializationInspection
Via Settings dialog

Path to the inspection settings via IntelliJ Platform IDE Settings dialog, when you need to adjust inspection settings directly from your IDE.

Settings or Preferences | Editor | Inspections | PHP | Code style

Suppressing Inspection

You can suppress this inspection by placing the following comment marker before the code fragment where you no longer want messages from this inspection to appear:

//noinspection PhpDangerousArrayInitializationInspection

More detailed instructions as well as other ways and options that you have can be found in the product documentation:

Last modified: 18 September 2025