Question

I’m getting this error on the commented line. Any idea why?

Fatal error: Call-time pass-by-reference has been removed in myfile.php on line 301
Call Stack
#   Time    Memory  Function    Location
1   0.0002  245352  {main}( )   ../plugins.php:0
2   0.3016  7149968 plugin_sandbox_scrape( )    ../plugins.php:156

Code is below…

function rseo_doTheParse($tag, $post){
    //headings
    $keyword = rseo_sanitize3(trim(strtolower(rseo_getKeyword($post))));
    $content = rseo_sanitize3($post->post_content);
    $match = 0;

            $token = '/<'.$tag.'[^>]*>(.*\b'.$keyword.'\b.*)<\/'.$tag.'>/siU';
            if(preg_match($token, &$content, $matches)) //THIS IS LINE 301
            {
                $match = 1;
            }
            return $match;
        }

Answer 1

Remove the & from &$content, which is the call time pass by reference.

PHP has long supported passing arguments by reference; historically this has been possible to do either by declaring the function to receive an argument by reference:

function foo(&$argument) { ... }

foo($value); // pass by reference

or by using pass-by-reference at the call site:

function foo($argument) { ... }

foo(&$value); // call time pass by reference

The latter option has been removed in PHP 5.4, and this is the reason for the error.