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what does the & symbol mean here? function $ funcNam() { ..

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Dec 27.2012

not sure if i’ve come across this before or not. this is from a class file of a shopping cart i’m
currently having to working with

function & getStaticProperty($var)
{
static $staticProperty;
return $staticProperty;
}

what does the ‘&’ symbol mean??,

thanks

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PHP

2 Comments(s) ↴

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@eval_BadCode_Dec 27.2012 — That is very odd. It is typically called the referencing operator, (a reference to a value in memory as opposed to a value itself).

I'm not sure what it means in this situation... What PHP version are you running?
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@eval_BadCode_Dec 27.2012 — http://php.net/manual/en/language.references.return.php

it's returning a reference to a static value. Keep in mind PHP uses a reference counting system for garbage collection. I don't see any reason to do this, perhaps this code was written as some type of 'work around' in an older version of PHP.
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