Actually this is not a bug, but just another BC break, but a pretty huge one. I think it's too much of a problem not to address it.

It never really worked (caused memory corruption).
Unlikely to be changed, since it doesn't make sense, but we'll see.

If you do it like this it works:

class TextSanitizer
{
 function &htmlSpecialChars($text) {
  $foo = preg_replace("/&/i", '&', htmlspecialchars($text, ENT_QUOTES));
  return $foo;
 }
}

So would it really be *that* hard to make it work?

Yes, it is quite complicated.  You can only return variables by reference, a function's return value is not something we can 'connect' to...

Any idea yet if this will be fixed/addressed or should we start converting scripts to not use referenced return type or build variables that get returned?

I agree with Zeev on this one, this shouldn't be fixed. People will need to learn to write good code one day or the other, and returning a reference like that is VERY bad practice (try to do that in C++!). Even returning a reference to a local variable like this example should produce an error :

class foo
{
    function &bar()
    {
        $whatever = 5;
        return $whatever;
    }
}

because $whatever should not exist anymore after function bar return (according to correct scope rules), thus this reference is not referencing anything anymore... Instead of always asking to fix bad programming practice people should learn the correct way to do it. This is my opinion.

and this?

Fatal error: Only variables or references can be returned by reference in /usr/lib/php/DB/common.php on line 766

function &query($query, $params = array()) {
 if (sizeof($params) > 0) {
  $sth = $this->prepare($query);
   if (DB::isError($sth)) {
    return $sth;
   }
  $ret = $this->execute($sth, $params);
  $this->freePrepared($sth);
  return $ret;
 } else {
  $result = $this->simpleQuery($query);
   if (DB::isError($result) || $result === DB_OK) {
    return $result;
   } else {
-->766 return new DB_result($this, $result);
   }
  }
 }

running on Apache/2.0.48 (Trustix Secure Linux/Linux) PHP/5.0.0b2

This bug pretty much rules out backwards compatibility with most php4 OOP programs.  It's quite silly to say that returning a reference by calling another function that returns a reference is "bad" programing practice.  And by the way, C++ has no problem with returning pointers.

Just to be clear:

function &getHomeTeam()
{
  return $this->getTeam(TEAM_TYPE_HOME);
}
Really should work.

Zeev, please, either fix this or set the status to 'wont fix'.

This bug has been fixed in CVS.

Snapshots of the sources are packaged every three hours; this change
will be in the next snapshot. You can grab the snapshot at
http://snaps.php.net/.
 
Thank you for the report, and for helping us make PHP better.