Bug #67807 [Com]: Object passed by reference becomes a string

Edit report at https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=67807&edit=1 ID: 67807 Comment by: atlantisnova at gmail dot com Reported by: atlantisnova at gmail dot com Summary: Object passed by reference becomes a string Status: Open Type: Bug Package: Scripting Engine problem Operating System: Debian Linux PHP Version: 5.4.4 Block user comment: N Private report: N New Comment: In case it's helpful for anyone else with similar issues: we discovered this problem because objects seemed to "disappear" between calls, eg: $my_obj->do_thing1() || $my_obj->do_thing2(); $my_obj works fine when do_thing1 is called, but throws a "Call to a member function do_thing2() on a non-object" fatal error on do_thing2. This is because do_thing1 called an $other_object->other_function($this), which accepted that param by reference (public function other_function(&$obj)). Any notice (undefined variable, trigger_error, etc) in other_function caused $obj/$this/$my_obj to be rewritten as 'MyClass' due to our custom error handler (which was trying to stringify/truncate the stack trace for logging purposes), and hence the call to do_thing2() failed (since we were calling it on a string). Previous Comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2014-08-08 20:50:49] requinix@php.net Yeah, that certainly explains it. So what to do with this? The most similar report I can find is bug #48847 where @stas says that modifying data in the backtrace is "definitely not a supported functionality", but I'm not sure whether to interpret that as meaning undesired behavior (a bug) or undefined behavior (not a bug). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2014-08-08 20:06:07] atlantisnova at gmail dot com Why yes, yes I am... sorry it's done in an auto_prepend and I forgot about it. And yes, that was the problem: http://3v4l.org/FUqWS (includes the original comment explaining why we were converting to classname) Looks like the objects returned by debug_backtrace() are true references, and hence when we were looping through to truncate the log message the object got wiped. So I'm happy because it's an easy fix - feel free to close this ticket unless you feel that debug_backtrace should return object identifiers rather than aliases... looks like it already functions that way in hhvm. Either way, thanks so much for your time! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2014-08-08 18:28:40] requinix@php.net You wouldn't happen to be using a custom error handler, right? If you are, what's the code? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2014-08-08 18:10:29] atlantisnova at gmail dot com Tried disabling xdebug and newrelic extensions... still no dice. If there's a private way to submit my phpinfo() I'd be happy to do that. Thanks! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2014-08-08 18:04:35] atlantisnova at gmail dot com Sure here you go: [PHP Modules] bcmath bz2 calendar Core ctype curl date dba dom ereg exif fileinfo filter ftp gd gettext hash iconv imap json libxml mbstring mcrypt memcache mhash mysql mysqli newrelic openssl pcntl pcre PDO pdo_mysql Phar posix Reflection session shmop SimpleXML soap sockets SPL standard sysvmsg sysvsem sysvshm tokenizer wddx xdebug xml xmlreader xmlwriter zip zlib [Zend Modules] Xdebug I also tried xdebug_disable(); but the issue was still there. Thanks for looking into this! I'll try disabling xdebug in php.ini and restarting apache next... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The remainder of the comments for this report are too long. To view the rest of the comments, please view the bug report online at https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=67807 -- Edit this bug report at https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=67807&edit=1