How does the “&” operator work in a PHP function?

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The & operator tells PHP not to copy the array when passing it to the function. Instead, a reference to the array is passed into the function, thus the function modifies the original array instead of a copy.

Just look at this minimal example:

<?php
function foo($a) { $a++; }
function bar(&$a) { $a++; }

$x = 1;
foo($x);
echo "$x\n";    
bar($x);
echo "$x\n";
?>

Here, the output is:

1
2

– the call to foo didn’t modify $x. The call to bar, on the other hand, did.

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