PHP Array is getting Consumed
===

I had that wired thing using Array's on PHP.

    $items = array();
    $tools = json_decode($_GET['tools'],true);
    foreach($tools as $key => $value)
    {
       $items[$somevar][$anothervar] = $value;
    }

than i could iterate `$items` 

    foreach($items as $key => $value)
    {
      //Do Something
    }

But the wired part is ,when i tried again to iterate through `$tools` with `foreach` ,it return's NULL.

    //Never Happens    
    foreach($items as $key => $value)
            {
              //Do Something
            }

Could this caused by the Garbage Collector !

My app is running into PHP 5.2.3 ,Linux CentOS , Apache 2.2.