Illegal Offset of an Array on Production Site - php

Question

I'm getting the following warning message:
Warning: Illegal offset type in
/home/bmtuser/public_html/wp-content/plugins/plugin_name/plugin_file.php
on line 238
The offending line is the following code:
$new_sorted_array[$sort_order] = $term->term_id;
Here is the code before it to set that:
$new_sorted_array = array( );
foreach ( $terms as $term ) {
$taxonomy_id = 'taxonomy_'.$term->term_id;
$sort_order = get_option( $taxonomy_id, $term );
$new_sorted_array[$sort_order] = $term->term_id;
}
ksort( $new_sorted_array, SORT_NUMERIC );
This works fine on my localhost but when I moved it to production it's give me this error. Why would that be the case?

Answer 1

$sort_order cannot be an index of $new_sorted_array. Mostly because it is not a number, neither a string.
Maybe your error displaying is lower on your machine. Include this at the top of your code for maximum error reporting: error_reporting(-1);

Answer 2

The warning means that you're using for index variable of type object. It probably means that always or in some cases $term->term_id is not integer but object.
Firs you have to check the case and in case it is normal situation then you can avoid it by next addition:
<?php
$new_sorted_array = array( );
foreach ( $terms as $term ) {
$xxx=$term->term_id;
if(gettype($xxx)=='object') continue;
$taxonomy_id = 'taxonomy_'.$xxx;
$sort_order = get_option( $taxonomy_id, $term );
$new_sorted_array[$sort_order] = $term->term_id;
}
ksort( $new_sorted_array, SORT_NUMERIC );
?>
In this way you'll avoid bad indexes.
I'm not agree that warning has to be suppressed - they has to be resolved.