Yeah, this is one of the most annoying things about PHP for me. Another similar one is that you can't use empty() on the result of a function call without assi

Yeah, this is one of the most annoying things about PHP for me. Another similar one is that you can't use empty() on the result of a function call without assigning it to a variable first, and the error you get is something about an invalid write context, which is pretty opaque if you don't just happen to know what it means already.