Got this error and after some digging I found a solution. It was listed below. But looking back into my code I noticed that I called the function twice and used it incorrectly that caused the error!. Anyways, aside from that in case you encountered this error you can have the solution below

Warning: Call-time pass-by-reference has been deprecated – argument passed by value; If you would like to pass it by reference, modify the declaration of [runtime function name](). If you would like to enable call-time pass-by-reference, you can set allow_call_time_pass_reference to true in your INI file. However, future versions may not support this any longer

Solution:

For the Warning: Call-time pass-by-reference, in c:\EasyPhp\apache
\php.ini set :
allow_call_time_pass_reference = true