More specifically, an ampersand (&) prepended to an argument
name means that the argument will be passed by reference
(http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.references.pass.php). How
to read a function definition (prototype) Each function in the
manual is documented for quick reference. Knowing how to read
and understand the text will make learning PHP much easier.
Rather than relying on examples or cut/paste, everyone should
know how to read function definitions (prototypes). Let's begin:
Note: Prerequisite: Basic understanding of types Although PHP is
a loosely typed language, it's important to have a basic
understanding of types as they have important meaning. strlen
(PHP 4, PHP 5) strlen -- Get string length Description int
strlen ( string $string ) Returns the length of given string.
|strlen||The function name.| |(PHP 4, PHP 5)||strlen() has been
around in all versions of PHP 4 and PHP 5| |int||Type of value
this function returns, which is an integer (i.e. the length of a
string is measured in numbers).|