Convert PHP object to associative array

Question

I'm integrating an API to my website which works with data stored in objects while my code is written using arrays.

I'd like a quick and dirty function to convert an object to an array.

Answer 1

Custom Function to convert stdClass to array:

function objectToArray($d) {
    if (is_object($d)) {
        // Gets the properties of the given object
        // with get_object_vars function
        $d = get_object_vars($d);
    }

    if (is_array($d)) {
        /*
        * Return array converted to object
        * Using __FUNCTION__ (Magic constant)
        * for recursive call
        */
        return array_map(__FUNCTION__, $d);
    } else {
        // Return array
        return $d;
    }
}

Another custom function to convert Array to stdClass:

function arrayToObject($d) {
    if (is_array($d)) {
        /*
        * Return array converted to object
        * Using __FUNCTION__ (Magic constant)
        * for recursive call
        */
        return (object) array_map(__FUNCTION__, $d);
    } else {
        // Return object
        return $d;
    }
}

Usage Example:

    // Create new stdClass Object
$init = new stdClass;

// Add some test data
$init->foo = "Test data";
$init->bar = new stdClass;
$init->bar->baaz = "Testing";
$init->bar->fooz = new stdClass;
$init->bar->fooz->baz = "Testing again";
$init->foox = "Just test";

// Convert array to object and then object back to array
$array = objectToArray($init);
$object = arrayToObject($array);

// Print objects and array
print_r($init);
echo "\n";
print_r($array);
echo "\n";
print_r($object);

Answer 2

There's my proposal, if you have objects in objects with even private members:

public function dismount($object) {
    $reflectionClass = new \ReflectionClass(get_class($object));
    $array = array();
    foreach ($reflectionClass->getProperties() as $property) {
        $property->setAccessible(true);
        if (is_object($property->getValue($object))) {
            $array[$property->getName()] = $this->dismount($property->getValue($object));
        } else {
            $array[$property->getName()] = $property->getValue($object);
        }
        $property->setAccessible(false);
    }
    return $array;
}

Answer 3

function readObject($object) {
    $name = get_class ($object);
    $name = str_replace('\\', "\\\\", $name); \\ Comment this line, if you dont use class namespaces approach in your project
    $raw = (array)$object;

    $attributes = array();
    foreach ($raw as $attr => $val) {
        $attributes[preg_replace('('.$name.'|\*|)', '', $attr)] = $val;
    }
    return $attributes;
}

returns array without special characters and class names

Answer 4

Just typecast it

$array =  (array) $yourObject;

From http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.array.php

If an object is converted to an array, the result is an array whose elements are the object's properties. The keys are the member variable names, with a few notable exceptions: integer properties are unaccessible; private variables have the class name prepended to the variable name; protected variables have a '*' prepended to the variable name. These prepended values have null bytes on either side.

Example: Simple Object

$object = new StdClass;
$object->foo = 1;
$object->bar = 2;

var_dump( (array) $object );

Output:

array(2) {
  'foo' => int(1)
  'bar' => int(2)
} 

Example: Complex Object

class Foo
{
    private $foo;
    protected $bar;
    public $baz;

    public function __construct()
    {
        $this->foo = 1;
        $this->bar = 2;
        $this->baz = new StdClass;
    }
}

var_dump( (array) new Foo );

Output (with \0s edited in for clarity):

array(3) {
  '\0Foo\0foo' => int(1)
  '\0*\0bar' => int(2)
  'baz' => class stdClass#2 (0) {}
}

Output with var_export instead of var_dump:

array (
  '' . "\0" . 'Foo' . "\0" . 'foo' => 1,
  '' . "\0" . '*' . "\0" . 'bar' => 2,
  'baz' => 
  stdClass::__set_state(array(
  )),
)

Typecasting this way will not do deep casting of the object graph and you need to apply the null bytes (as explained in the manual quote) to access any non-public attributes. So this works best when casting StdClass objects or objects with only public properties. For quick and dirty (what you asked for) it's fine.

Also see this in-depth blog post:

• http://ocramius.github.io/blog/fast-php-object-to-array-conversion/

Answer 5

Since a lot of people find this thread because of having trouble with dynamically access attributes of an object, I will just point out that you can do this in php: $valueRow->{"valueName"}

In Context (removed HTML output for readability):

$valueRows = json_decode("{...}"); // rows of unordered values decoded from a json-object

foreach($valueRows as $valueRow){

    foreach($references as $reference){

        if(isset($valueRow->{$reference->valueName})){
            $tableHtml .= $valueRow->{$reference->valueName};
        }else{
            $tableHtml .= " ";
        }

    }

}

Answer 6

What about get_object_vars($obj)? Seems useful if you only want to access the public properties of an object. http://www.php.net/function.get-object-vars