[AndrewD]

Originally Posted by Danny.VBT

What values were you expecting?

I was expecting $GLOBALS['abc'] to be identical to global $abc inside the function, and it isn't.

As you say, it's explained in the php help manual:

Warning
If you assign a reference to a variable declared global inside a function, the reference will be visible only inside the function. You can avoid this by using the $GLOBALS array. Think about global $var; as a shortcut to $var =& $GLOBALS['var'];. Thus assigning other reference to $var only changes the local variable's reference.

I didn't get that far on that page.