get_role triggers a PHP notice

[elyobo]

get_role (in wp-includes/capabilities.php) incorrectly returns a null value as a reference, triggering a PHP notice "Only variable references should be returned by reference".

While this is not a terribly important problem, it is easily resolved with the patch attached (just assign the value to a variable first, then return that).

This is a more important issue for us because we develop using a custom error handler which throws ErrorExceptions on all notices. This helps to catch a range of PHP errors (e.g. typos, uninitialised variables and whatnot), but is sometimes a PITA because of things like this.

[elyobo]

get_roles patch

[nacin]

Can you submit an svn diff, rather than a diff -u?

This looks good.

[elyobo]

Patch as svn diff from trunk

[elyobo]

Diff is against the current SVN trunk.

[scribu]

I think making get_role() not return a reference would be a better fix, now that we're in PHP5 land.

[ocean90]

Maybe we should close this ticket as a dup of #16767 and review the reference uses in core.

[elyobo]

Agreed with scribu; I was trying to keep the patch small rather than messing with the widespread use of references, but scratching the reference is a cleaner solution.

How likely is it that #16767 will get rolled in?

[ryan]

In [18476]:

Remove return by ref from get_role(). Props scribu, elyobo. fixes #18237