You missed the point, and the problem. PHP tries way too hard to try to mangle input to kinda sorta work with the operators at hand. Were it a reasonable langua

You missed the point, and the problem. PHP tries way too hard to try to mangle input to kinda sorta work with the operators at hand. Were it a reasonable language, it would throw out a warning, or better yet, an error, to handle a fairly broken situation like this, rather than try to pick and choose the parts of the string it thinks is appropriate.