How to call a function on a variable in PHP?

Question

I am having to do:

$sourceElement['description'] = htmlspecialchars_decode($sourceElement['description']);

I want to avoid that redundant mention of the variable name. I tried:

htmlspecialchars_decode(&$sourceElement['description']);

and

call_user_func('htmlspecialchars_decode', &$sourceElement['description']);

That did not work. Is this possible in PHP? Call a function on a variable?

Answer 1

You could create your own wrapper function that takes the variable by reference:

function html_dec(&$str) {$str = htmlspecialchars_decode($str);}

Then call:

html_dec($sourceElement['description']);