[Solved] Php Operator &= What Does It Mean?

[pberce]

I am in the process of making a modification to the order process and I ran across the following line of code:

 

foreach ($products AS $product)
  $success &= $cart->updateQty($product['quantity'], (int)$product['id_product'], (int)$product['id_product_attribute'], NULL, 'up');

 

I've never see the use of &= in php and I'm having trouble finding out what it means. Does this mean assign by reference?

[Mike Kranzler]

Hi pberce,

 

The & sign was used for passing values as reference, but now it's deprecated. In this case, the logic might be trying to update the qty in the cart, and then assign it to $success, but still have the qty in the cart modified for future use during runtime.

 

For more information on this, I suggest you check the discussions here and here.

 

I hope this helps.

 

-Mike

[pberce]

Mike,

 

Thanks for the reply and the two links. One of the links linked to yet another post that talked about this. They referred to it as shorthand for the bitwise operator:

 

$a &= $b is short for $a = $a & $b

 

Which makes sense given what was being done at that point in the code, it was trying to preserve a boolean success flag over a series of attempts. If one of the updateQty calls failed during the foreach loop then the end result would be false, very clever.

 

I was initially thinking the same thing as you, that it was some type of pass by reference, but that didn't sound right to me.