Undefined offset: 1 in /wp-admin/includes/dashboard.php on line 1227

[FlyerUA]

This happens at the home page of the Dashboard, from within WordPress News widget, when it tries to get a random popular non-installed plugin. Can be easily recreated every time by deleting transient _transient_dash_88ae138922fe95674369b1cb3d215a2b from within the options table.

[psysolix]

Hi FlyerUA,

I am having this issue as well, I suspected it was because of a configuration change by Vagrant. (VVV) Are you using Varying Vagrant for local development?

I also have this bug when installing/updating/ usage of duplicator plugin (when making package)

I'm changing it to Major Prio, because multiple people are affected.
​https://wordpress.org/support/topic/undefined-index-and-undefined-offset/

Have you encountered a temp fix for it?

Thanks!

[psysolix]

Error Log

[FlyerUA]

Hi, psysolix.
I've tried on one site hosted on WP Engine (I'm not sure if Vagrant is used there) and on 2 sites (1 development and one was completely clean install for the sake of testing this bug) on my own VPS (Vagrant is not used for sure), so I'm pretty sure Vagrant has nothing to do with this bug.
I haven't tried plugin you've mentioned to see if it happens to me too.
And no, I haven't encountered any temp fix yet.
Also, I can't change priority. It's grayed out for me.

[Presskopp]

FYI: 'list' logic has changed with PHP7, and 'array_pad' could be helping here.

[FlyerUA]

Oh, good thing you've mentioned it.
While my VPS does have 7.1.4, site hosted on WP engine has 5.6.30

[wfasa]

Confirmed bug is PHP version independent also seeing this on Multisite with PHP 5.5.38

[wfasa]

It looks to me like this happens because that row tries to explode a string by # but no # exists in the string. Here is line 1227

list($link, $frag) = explode( '#', $item->get_link() );

and here is a var_dump of $item->get_link()

string(42) "https://wordpress.org/plugins/woocommerce/"

That $frag doesn't look like it's being used anywhere, but it would have been populated with that "offset 1" mentioned in the error message if the string actually had a #.

[chesio]

I'm getting these notices on several sites too, they started to pop up 2-3 weeks ago already.

Since $frag variable is unused as @wfasa noticed, a simple way to stop getting the notices is to omit $frag from list construct:

list($link, ) = explode( '#', $item->get_link() );

[chesio]

Patch for #40654

[FlyerUA]

Patch for #40654. Removes seemingly pointless list

[FlyerUA]

Patch for #40654. Removes seemingly pointless list

[iandunn]

Related #40702, which deprecates wp_dashboard_plugins_output().

[chesio]

The entire wp_dashboard_plugins_output() function has been removed in [40607], so this issue will be gone with 4.8.