Question

Is there any way to easily fix this issue or do I really need to rewrite all the legacy code?

PHP Fatal error: Call-time pass-by-reference has been removed in … on line 30

This happens everywhere as variables are passed into functions as references throughout the code.

Answer 1

You should be denoting the call by reference in the function definition, not the actual call. Since PHP started showing the deprecation errors in version 5.3, I would say it would be a good idea to rewrite the code.

From the documentation:

There is no reference sign on a function call – only on function definitions. Function definitions alone are enough to correctly pass the argument by reference. As of PHP 5.3.0, you will get a warning saying that “call-time pass-by-reference” is deprecated when you use & in foo(&$a);.

For example, instead of using:

// Wrong way!
myFunc(&$arg);               # Deprecated pass-by-reference argument
function myFunc($arg) { }

Use:

// Right way!
myFunc($var);                # pass-by-value argument
function myFunc(&$arg) { }