Nowhere in the documentaiont explains that if the entire DBF file is lacking a record for one whole column, you will not get a blank entry in your result from dbase_get_record(). You must use dbase_get_record_with_names(), it is the only safe way to read dbase files in PHP 4.
For example, if you have a dbase file with 12 columns, but 3 of them contain no data in any record, then your array returned from dbase_get_record() will only have 9 sequential array keys and values, leaving you no way to figure out which are the missing columns.
dbase_get_record_with_names