[please ignore!] Re: [PHP] [from internals] Re: ref fix revisited

Rasmus please ignore my last mail, I was being blind and stupid. Jasper Bryant-Greene wrote:

Jochem Maas wrote:

hello Rasmus, sorry to interrupt ... but ... could you possibly spare a moment to explain why the SquirrelMail example you gave is 'dumb' code? (I for one would like to avoid writing dumb code wherever possible, and it looks a lot like I line I could have written!) many thanks and regards, jochem Rasmus Lerdorf wrote: ...

SquirrelMail has code like this all over the place: $value = strtolower(array_shift(split('/\w/',trim($value))));

I know I'm not Rasmus ... but I thought he already explained it pretty well in the email you quoted. By the way, please don't top-post.

only if Rasmus asks ;-)! normally I don't top-post but in this case I figured I save Rasmus the effort of scrolling ... I figured he'd remember the gist of a email he himself wrote less than a day ago...

array_shift [1] receives its first argument as a reference (and modifies it), but because you're not actually passing a variable here, but actually the result of split(), what exactly is array_shift meant to modify?

ok it's too early I guess, I looked right past it - I was thinking to complex, thanks for the heads up...

A better way to write that would be: <?php $value_parts = split('/\w/', trim($value)); $value = strtolower($value_parts[0]); ?> ... which has the advantage of being a bit more readable too.

debatable ... no bog deal either way ... $value = split('/\w/', trim($value)); $value = strtolower($value[0]); ... saves a var, no?

[1] http://php.net/array_shift