[php] Illegal string offset Warning PHP

There are a lot of great answers here - but I found my issue was quite a bit more simple.

I was trying to run the following command:

$x['name']   = $j['name'];

and I was getting this illegal string error on $x['name'] because I hadn't defined the array first. So I put the following line of code in before trying to assign things to $x[]:

$x = array();

and it worked.