Does reassigning an array to another array free memory originally used by the array?

Question

My class has a member variable array, items. Periodically I reassign the array to be the value of another, temporary array, like this:

$temp = array();
$temp[] = new Object();
$temp[] = new Object();
$temp[] = new Object();
... etc.

$this->items = $temp;

So, could I have a memory leak? By reassigning the value of $this->temp to a new value, $temp, would all the items (the items are objects) originally in $this->temp still linger around, or would they be freed?

Answer 1

They will linger around for a little while, but in PHP they will be freed eventually by the garbage collector.

Answer 2

This will not cause a memory leak. $temp and $this->items are just references to the same array. Since PHP is a garbage collected language, the array will be deleted (garbage collected) when there are no more references to the array.