Passing an undetermined amount of arguments by reference

Greetings list. Say I have a function that escapes a string before being passed to MySQL like so: function escape($id, &$string) { $string = mysql_real_escape_string($string, $id); } I'm passing $string as a reference so I don't have to reassign it like so: $foo = escape($id, $foo); Simply calling escape($id, $foo); works just fine. How can I do this if I have a variable number of arguments? I know I can use func_get_args(), func_num_args() and so forth to get the arguments but can I still pass by reference? It'd be so much easier to do escape($id, $a, $b, $c, $d); Than $a = escape($id, a); and so forth. Does this make sense? Is it possible to do? Thanks in advance, Jay