What does "&" mean in this case?

Question

I know that it's creating a reference in other cases. But what happens here?

$crawler = &new MyCrawler();

score 7 · Accepted Answer · edited Dec 05 '15 at 15:09

7

It creates an instance of MyCrawler and passes the reference for that instance into $crawler. In PHP5 this is assumed so the use of the & is deprecated.

See Object References (the Ampersand).

edited Dec 05 '15 at 15:09

Peter Mortensen

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answered Feb 19 '10 at 16:01

Joel Etherton

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so if i remove the & it will have the same effect as of php5? – ajsie Feb 19 '10 at 16:37
@noname: Yah it'll still assign as expected. – Joel Etherton Feb 19 '10 at 16:48

score 6 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 19 '10 at 16:05

6

That is deprecated per the PHP documentation

answered Feb 19 '10 at 16:05

Dancrumb

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More that you shouldn't... deprecated features will ultimately be removed, resulting in broken code. – Dancrumb Feb 19 '10 at 23:25
...resulting in DATED code. it's technically not broken UNTIL you update your PHP version but don't bring your code up to date (which is what migration guides are for). The code is not broken if it works as intended in PHP version it was intended for. – hndcrftd Mar 11 '20 at 18:12

What does "&" mean in this case?

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