PHP 5 -> PHP 4... help, please!

Argh...

A web host (Canaca) seems to be living in the stone ages, as yet unable to carry out a simple (not to mention FREE!) upgrade from PHP 4 to PHP 5.

As a result, I have had to severely mangle a little web site to get it talking to PHP 4. (Well, not much so far; I first had to remove a few hard-coded paths that I had).

Not much mangling had occurred before I encountered an error. (One that makes me wonder how anyone can possibly consider PHP 4 a viable alternative to the vastly superior version 5).

Without further adieu:
I get the following error message with my page:


Here is the very messy (and rather idiotic) Page class, used to unify every aspect of page generation into a single concept (which turns out to be, surprisingly, a heck of a lot more sane than various other CMS systems out there):

	class Page
	{
		var $Path; //Public in PHP 5
		var $data=array(); //Private in PHP 5
		
		function Page($Path)
		{			
			$this->Path=$Path;
			
			if( file_exists($Path.'/data.vars') )
			{
				$varsList=str_replace(array("\n","\r"),'',file_get_contents($Path.'/data.vars'));
				$datatest=array();
				parse_str($varsList,$this->data); //Stuck here... PHP 4 doesn't like the way I'm passing a var of an object by reference
				//parse_str($varsList,$datatest);
				echo('Testing...'.$this->Title);
			}
		}
		
		function Output($mode='cnt',$Summarize=0,$DispLength=-1,$LinkTo=0,$BackLink=1)
		{
			//Snip
		}
		
		function Summarize($length)
		{
			//Snap
		}
		
		function GetContents($length = -1)
		{
			//("Blasted right handed scissors!")
		}
		
		function __get($key)
		{
			if (isset($this->data[$key])) {
				return stripslashes($this->data[$key]);
			//} elseif( isset($this->$key) ) {
			//	return $this->$key;
			} elseif( isset($GLOBALS['def_varsList'][$key]) ) {
				return $GLOBALS['def_varsList'][$key];
			}
		}

		function __set($key, $val)
		{
			if (isset($this->data[$key])) {
				$this->data[$key] = $val;
			//} elseif( isset($this->$key) ) {
			//	$this->$key=$val;
			}
		}
	}
	
	overload('Page'); //Set overloading for __get and __set. PHP 4 only. Comment out for PHP 5

This worked in PHP 5. The problem here has something to do with parse_str($varsList,$this->data).
More specifically, I believe it has to do with my passing $this->data by reference.

The commented out parse_str($varsList,$datatest) does work. The only difference I can think of between that and the code that I want (which gives a fatal error) is that $datatest is a variable local to the function instead of the class, and maybe that it was defined as an array in the same place.

Possible reasons that I can think of:

-PHP 4's function overloading being ugly. (Thus __get and __set could be behaving very differently in PHP 5...)

-Maybe PHP 4 doesn't like to pass arrays by reference? (That would be weird)

-Maybe PHP 4 doesn't like to pass variables in an object by refference?


As is obvious, I am stumped.
Any thoughts?
Thanks in advance!

Try setting that to a variable rather than passing in the refference.

See if that corrects it.



Actually, there are known issues with using Apache2 and Php5. There are workarounds, but messy.

Have you tried passing a pointer?

parse_str($varsList,&$this);

function parse_str($varsList, &$object)
{
     $data = $object->data;
}