Code housekeeping stuff (and barring any stuff-ups on my behalf, there should be no changes in behaviour whatsoever after this) -
* removing some unused global declarations.
* removing or commenting out or adding comments for unused local vars.
* Adding one or two local var declarations.
* Declaring $matches array passed to preg_match() / preg_match_all() as array() before using [not required, just have a slight preference for the explicitness].
* remove one or two pass-by-reference function declarations where the value is not modified.
* Adding some braces to if-else blocks.
* In Parser.php, stripstrate is now an object rather than an array as per r17820, so we no longer need ask for a reference to it (as in "$x =& $this->mStripState;"), and in fact it's probably just simpler to get rid of $x altogether.
* Moving some preg regexes from "" quoting to '' quoting to stop static analyzer whinging about bad escape sequences.
... up to "LinksUpdate.php" in the includes/ directory.