Is it a bad practice to use spaces in PHP associative array indexes?

Question

I have to pass some parameters using an associative array, something like this:

$blockGroup['name=products type=complete']

Doing some tests i saw that it works, but is it a bad practice? Is it possible to generate any bug or unexpected behavior?

Thanks for any suggestion!

EDIT 1

I am using this array in a view implementation, the complete structure is:

$blockGroup['name=products type=complete'][] =
    array(
        'name'  => 'GeForce',
        'value' => '99.99'
    );

Answer 1

No, it's not. Space symbol in programming doesn't really have a special meaning. Symbols enclosed in quotes and thus forming a string can be used as associative array keys.

In fact, there are a lot of times when using such keys for associative arrays will make your code readable and handy to make changes to it.

$scores = array("John Doe" => 100, "Ivan Ivanovich" => 75.3);

What I see is you trying to use array keys as an expression, which is REALLY bad practice. Things are meant for what they meant for. Use associative keys as associative keys.