In his latest post Nikita Popov aims to make a case against the introduction of the "ifsetor" function to be introduced into the PHP language. This function takes in a variable to find and, if found returns it. If not, it doesn't produce an error (or warning).

Recently igorw wrote a blog post on how to traverse nested array structures with potentially non-existing keys without throwing notices. The current “idiomatic” way to do something like this, is to use isset() together with a ternary operator. [...] Someone on /r/PHP pointed out that there is an alternative approach to this problem, namely the use of an ifsetor function.

He goes on to talk about by-reference argument passing, why requesting an undefined array index doesn't really throw an error and how writes don't have the same issues as reads. He then gets into his own issues around the "ifsetor" function, namely:

• Creation of dummy values
• No notices for nested indices
• Null values treated as non-existing
• Default is always evaluated
• By-reference passing often forces a copy

He summarizes most of the issues in one statement - "there is way too much by-ref magic involved". He then looks at some of the ways that this could be helped but opts instead for something more like "get_in" as proposed by Igor.