How can checking if a variable is an array before manipulating it help prevent errors in PHP code?

When manipulating variables in PHP, it's important to check if a variable is an array before attempting to perform array-specific operations on it. This can help prevent errors such as "Trying to access array offset on value of type null" or "Uncaught Error: Cannot use object of type stdClass as array". By checking if a variable is an array before manipulating it, we can ensure that our code only tries to perform array operations on variables that are actually arrays.

// Check if the variable is an array before manipulating it
if (is_array($myArray)) {
    // Perform array-specific operations here
    foreach ($myArray as $item) {
        // Do something with each item in the array
    }
} else {
    // Handle the case where $myArray is not an array
    echo "Error: Variable is not an array.";
}