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Oddant
12 years ago
About the example on array references.
I think this should be written in the array chapter as well.
Indeed if you are new to programming language in some way, you should beware that arrays are pointers to a vector of Byte(s).

<?php $arr = array(1); ?>
$arr here contains a reference to which the array is located.
Writing :
<?php echo $arr[0]; ?>
dereferences the array to access its very first element.

Now something that you should also be aware of (even you are not new to programming languages) is that PHP use references to contains the different values of an array. And that makes sense because the type of the elements of a PHP array can be different.

Consider the following example :

<?php

$arr
= array(1, 'test');

$point_to_test =& $arr[1];

$new_ref = 'new';

$arr[1] =& $new_ref;

echo
$arr[1]; // echo 'new';
echo $point_to_test; // echo 'test' ! (still pointed somewhere in the memory)

?>

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