Can a reference variable in PHP be used to as an alias for long variable names?

Question

This may be a silly question to some, but I was curious how would PHP react to something such as:

$blog_title = &$author->get_blog()->get_title();

I'm assisting someone with some upgrades to an in house php framework. There is some serious method chaining going on, repeatedly in some places. I'd like to make the code more readable without unnecessary copies of variables. I'm unable to overhaul the code, so I have to work with what I've got.

I know it's probably not a great practice, but what are the potential downsides?

Answer 1

It would only make sense when the function actually returns a reference (my educated guess is it probably doesn't), which would mean you either hope the return stays static for the complete script, or you're breaking things. You could define your own short function or callback which will do the chaining for you as the next best thing.

By all means, keep a return of a function in a variable if it only needs to be evaluated once, but don't expect some magic from a reference when the return of a function is not one.

If the function does return a reference, the code is probably using references where they don't make sense, and you should fix that asap :P.