PHP's =& operator

Question

Are both these PHP statements doing the same thing?:

$o =& $thing;

$o = &$thing;

Dennis

Answer 1

Yes, they are both the exact same thing. They just take the reference of the object and reference it within the variable $o. Please note, thing should be variables.

Gillead

Yes, sorry I did mean $thing. – Dennis

Answer 2

They're not the same thing, syntactically speaking. The operator is the atomic =& and this actually matters. For instance you can't use the =& operator in a ternary expression. Neither of the following are valid syntax:

$f = isset($field[0]) ? &$field[0] : &$field;
$f =& isset($field[0]) ? $field[0] : $field;

So instead you would use this:

isset($field[0]) ? $f =& $field[0] : $f =& $field;

Brubeck

I was hoping to find some documentation to confirm this, however php.net isn't very clear. What references do mentions =&, but, oddly, =& doesn't actually apear in the assignment operators (it's always $x = &$y;). Is the white space really significant or are these identical? Can you provide some references? – Frangipani

If the PHP folks wanted, they could modify the PHP parser to allow the second bad example above, but it looks like the =& combination is interpreted by the preprocessor and not at runtime. If you peek at the source code of the PHP compiler/interpreter you can confirm this. – Brubeck

Answer 3

They both give an expected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM error.

If you meant $o = &$thing; then that assigns the reference of thing to o. Here's an example:

$thing = "foo";

$o = &$thing;

echo $o; // echos foo

$thing = "bar";

echo $o; // echos bar

Undesigning

Yes, sorry I did mean $thing. – Dennis

Answer 4

The difference is very important:

<?php
$a = "exists";
$b = $a;
$c =& $a;
echo "a=".$a.", b=".$b.", c=".$c."<br/>"; //a=exists b=exists c=exists

$a = null;
echo "a=".$a.", b=".$b.", c=".$c; //a= b=exists c= 
?>

Variable $c dies as $a becomes NULL, but variable $b keeps its value.

Bonar

That's not what the (current edit) of the question is asking. – Carlin

Answer 5

Yes, they do. $o will become a reference to thing in both cases (I assume that thing is not a constant, but actually something meaningful as a variable).

Subteen

You don't reference functions like that, nor can you reference constants. – Fluter

Karl, I assumed that thing was NOT a constant since references to constants are pointless. You are correct about the functions though. – Leu

Yes, sorry I did mean $thing. – Dennis

This answer is obsolete, it was an answer to a former version which was errorenous forulated please delete this – Ratify

Answer 6

If you meant thing with a $ before them, then yes, both are assigning by reference. You can learn more about references in PHP here: http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.references.whatdo.php

Fluter

Yes, sorry I did mean $thing. – Dennis

This answer is obsolete, it was an answer to a former version which was errorenous forulated please delete this – Ratify