Illegal string offset 'total_users'

OK, I’ve dug into things a bit and I think this both is and is not a bug.

Yes, the code looks strange. If we’re on multisite, $user_count is set to an integer. In a standalone installation, it’s set to an array.

The $query variable is then constructed from a set of variables, one being $user_count['total_users']. Logically, this should fail for Multisite, and that’s exactly what you’re seeing.

However, and this is a big however, I can’t reproduce the warning you’re seeing. Even setting WP_DEBUG and forcing E_ALL for error reporting, $user_count['total_users'] returns the integer value and not a warning or error.

I’ve tried this on two different Apache systems and an Nginx system. I can’t get that error back out of the system, though I can see exactly where it would come up. I’ll post a ticket on Trac anyway, but I’m not seeing this as a wide-reaching issue (See #20966).

A short-term fix for you would be to turn off or lower your PHP warning settings.

Thanks for your infomation, cogmios.

I know this topic is resolved. But I have the same PHP warning, so, I want to say “Thank you!”. I also want to add the next information.

You wrote:

However starting from PHP version 5.4. it will throw: Warning: Illegal string offset ‘some_key’

However, PHP version 5.4 also returns “s” by my test.

When I test the next script, a PHP version < 5.4 returns “0”, but PHP version 5.4 returns “1”.

$expected_array_got_string = 'somestring';
echo empty($expected_array_got_string['some_key']);

In case you haven’t been following along, this has been fixed in Core, so it shouldn’t be a problem with the next version:

https://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/21105