I think its important to note your first example actually isn't valid. Part of PHP's type-mixing means strings that consist of an integer representation as arra

I think its important to note your first example actually isn't valid. Part of PHP's type-mixing means strings that consist of an integer representation as array keys are automatically casted to int. $arr = array(1 => 10, "1" => 11); echo $arr[1]; // >> 11