Neat PHP Tricks: Casting Arrays to Objects

Array notation is fine, but it can look a bit clunky when you’re working with complex structures. This is a fairly simple example, but I’m sure we’ve all dealt with worse:

 
$clientChanges['deletes'][$val['fkClient']] = $val['Total'];

Casting the array to an object allows us to use object notation (->) and makes the code more readable:

 
$val = (object) $val;
$clientChanges = (object) $clientChanges;
 
$clientChanges->deletes[$val->fkClient] = $val->Total;

You can even get away with using array functions on objects, as long as they’re just simple collections of properties:

 
$o3 = (object) array_merge( (array) $o1, (array) $o2 );

Of course, member functions won’t make it through this kind of mangling, but bizarrely, private variables do:

 
class O
{
    private $a = 4;
    var $b = 5;
    var $c = 6;
}
 
$o = new O();
 
$o = ( object ) array_reverse( ( array )$o );
 
var_dump( $o );
 
/**
 * outputs:
 *
 * object(stdClass)#2 (3) {
 *     ["c"]=> int(6)
 *     ["b"]=> int(5)
 *     ["a:private"]=> int(4)
 * }
 */