PHP foreach by reference causes weird glitch when going through array of objects

Question

I have an array of objects. The objects mainly have a bunch of properties because these are meta-data objects.

so it is like $objects[] is like a bunch of items that have properties like: object->item1, object->item2, etc.

I want to add something to each of these objects, so...

foreach ($objects as &$object) {
  $object->newItem=(something I compute);
}

then later, I want to display these objects as a list in html. So, I go:

foreach ($objects as $object) {
  <li><?php object output stuff here ?></li>
}

ok. Now, it works fine, except the last object is discarded and the second to last object is displayed twice. WTF??

Does this make sense to you?

Answer 1

If you iterate by reference, always unset the iteration variable afterwards:

foreach ($objects as &$object) {
      // some code
}
unset($object);

Excerpt from the foreach documentation:

Reference of a $value and the last array element remain even after the foreach loop. It is recommended to destroy it by unset().

If you want to understand why your code behaves the way it behaves, here is some further reading: References and foreach

Answer 2

Objects are always references, so just remove the '&'

foreach ($objects as $object) {
  $object->newItem=(something I compute);
}

foreach ($objects as $object) {
  echo "<li>{$object->someResult()}</li>";
}

I know you already got your answer, but this might help other devs find it faster.