#50355 [NEW]: Trying to access a magical property by reference only raises an E_NOTICE.

From: oorza2k5 at gmail dot com Operating system: Irrelevant PHP version: 5.3.1 PHP Bug Type: *General Issues Bug description: Trying to access a magical property by reference only raises an E_NOTICE. Description: ------------ When trying to access a magically returned (via __get()) property of a class, only an E_NOTICE is raised. While a function like array_pop will return a value (without modifying the overloaded property), some other operations will have less predictable results, such as array access via the "[]" syntax. Because a lot of distributions ship with a "$something | ~E_NOTICE" level of error reporting, and the "black box" ideas of object oriented programming (a developer trying to push an element onto a member array in an API class, for instance), this could be a very hard circumstance to debug. Furthermore, any case I can think of where this notice will be raised will never perform as expected, it will force the developer to re-engineer his solution. Because any case where this error would be raised will force a rewrite, I think that this circumstance should raise a fatal error instead. The fix is trivial enough that I did not attach a patch, but would be glad to in the future, if necessary. Reproduce code: --------------- <?php class foo { private $bar = array('1', '2', '3'); public function __get($var) { return $this->$var; } } $inst = new foo(); var_dump(array_pop($inst->bar)); Expected result: ---------------- PHP Fatal Error: Indirect modification of overloaded property foo::$bar has no effect in /home/blahblah/test.php on line 10 Actual result: -------------- PHP Notice: Indirect modification of overloaded property foo::$bar has no effect in /home/blahblah/test.php on line 10 -- Edit bug report at http://bugs.php.net/?id=50355&edit=1 -- Try a snapshot (PHP 5.2): http://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=50355&r=trysnapshot52 Try a snapshot (PHP 5.3): http://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=50355&r=trysnapshot53 Try a snapshot (PHP 6.0): http://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=50355&r=trysnapshot60 Fixed in SVN: http://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=50355&r=fixed Fixed in SVN and need be documented: http://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=50355&r=needdocs Fixed in release: http://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=50355&r=alreadyfixed Need backtrace: http://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=50355&r=needtrace Need Reproduce Script: http://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=50355&r=needscript Try newer version: http://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=50355&r=oldversion Not developer issue: http://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=50355&r=support Expected behavior: http://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=50355&r=notwrong Not enough info: http://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=50355&r=notenoughinfo Submitted twice: http://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=50355&r=submittedtwice register_globals: http://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=50355&r=globals PHP 4 support discontinued: http://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=50355&r=php4 Daylight Savings: http://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=50355&r=dst IIS Stability: http://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=50355&r=isapi Install GNU Sed: http://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=50355&r=gnused Floating point limitations: http://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=50355&r=float No Zend Extensions: http://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=50355&r=nozend MySQL Configuration Error: http://bugs.php.net/fix.php?id=50355&r=mysqlcfg