Get the reference count of an object in PHP?

Question

I realize the knee-jerk response to this question is that \"you dont.\", but hear me out.

Basically I am running on an active-record system on a SQL, and in order to

Answer 1

It seems like the best answer was still getting the reference count, although debug_zval_dump and ob_start was too ugly a hack to include in my application.

Instead I coded up a simple PHP module with a refcount() function, available at: http://github.com/qix/php_refcount