NYCPHP Meetup

[Brian Dailey]

If your professor was referring to PHP, it's possible he could have been 
referring to objects, not arrays. Objects are copied by reference, so if 
you do this:

$Item = new Item;
$Item2 = $Item;
$Item2->setProductId('12');
print $Item->getProductId();

Your output will be '12'. If you want to copy an object in PHP 5 you'll 
need to use 'clone.'

Aaron Fischer wrote:
> Indeed it does.  Sorry!  I was led to believe (by my cs professor) that 
> the default behavior when copying an array is that the copied array is 
> not a new instance but is tied by pointers to the old array, so changes 
> to one would change both of them.  Other people in the class are using 
> python and java, and apparently that is the case for them as they need 
> to use separate functions to make sure the copy created is not tied to 
> the old array.
> 
> Down near the bottom of the php.net page on arrays, right before the 
> user comments:
> You should be aware that array assignment always involves value copying. 
> It also means that the internal array pointer used by current() and 
> similar functions is reset. You need to use the reference operator to 
> copy an array by reference.
> http://us2.php.net/manual/en/language.types.array.php
> 
> -Aaron
> 
> On Feb 25, 2007, at 5:39 PM, Daniel Convissor wrote:
> 
>> Aaron:
>>
>> On Sun, Feb 25, 2007 at 03:47:45PM -0500, Aaron Fischer wrote:
>>> I need to copy an array by value, not by reference.  Is there a best
>>> way to do this?  Right now I found serialize/unserialize which seems
>>> to do the trick.
>>
>> What ARE you talking about?  Copying by value is the default behavior in
>> PHP.
>>
> 
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