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I've not used PHP for a couple years—my focus has primarily been on C, C++, Objective-C, Ruby & ECMAScript. I'm having a night of keeping my mind fresh by experimenting in some other languages.

I came across an example on PHP.net of casting arrays to an object to enable accessing it's values by key as if they were instance variable:

$obj = (object)array('foo' => 'bar', 'property' => 'value');

As an exercise, I'd like to create a function that takes the same arguments as array and returns the "array" already casted to an object. Something like:

function o_array(\* variable amount of key=>value args like array()*\)
{
  return (object)array.call(self, arguments);
}

I don't know how to construct a function that takes a variable amount of key=>value arguments in PHP. Thanks in advance for the advice.

UPDATE
I hope the following changes in the future since I see PHP's main strength as being its flexibility and general craziness (also its weakness). Named parameters are not supported: PHP language meeting regarding named params among other items.

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Have you looked at array_merge()? - php.net/array_merge –  Tigger Feb 17 '13 at 9:21
    
I was looking for named parameters, which apparently do not exist in PHP, even though they use them in the array function. Bummer. I already now how to convert an array to an object, or cast an array to an object. Definitely not attempting to merge arrays. Not sure where that came from. –  james_womack Feb 17 '13 at 9:24
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4 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted

PHP doesn't allow named arguments so this would not be possible. array is not a function but a language construct, that's why it's the only place you can use key value assignment

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php.net/~derick/meeting-notes.html#named-parameters –  james_womack Feb 17 '13 at 9:26
    
Even with named parameters it wouldn't work as the function still would probably have to define which parameter names it expects –  Dracony Feb 17 '13 at 17:48
    
That's correct @Dracony. Essentially I need named params and a version of php.net/func-get-args that can access args by key rather than index. They already implemented it to a certain extent for the array function, we're just not given access to it for writing our own functions. –  james_womack Feb 17 '13 at 19:52
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up vote 2 down vote

A variable amount of arguments is possible with func_get_args:

function f()
{
    $args = func_get_args();
    // ...
}

But there is no such thing as "key=>value arguments" for functions. So the only thing you can to, is passing them as array (which makes the whole function kind of pointless):

function arrayToObject(array $from)
{
     return (object)$from;
}
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+1 I accepted the @Dracony because it's straight to the point for programmers who come across the question in the future. You mentioned the same limitation of the language as well. Thanks. –  james_womack Feb 17 '13 at 9:29
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up vote 0 down vote

Sounds like you are trying to convert Array to Object. If that's the case here's something you can do : 

function array_to_object($array) {
  $obj = new stdClass;
  foreach($array as $k => $v) {
     if(is_array($v)) {
        $obj->{$k} = $this->array_to_object($v); 
     } else {
        $obj->{$k} = $v;
     }
  }
  return $obj;
}

So if you have the following array :

 $a = array('foo' => 'bar', 'property' => 'value');

Converting it will result with : 

 $o = array_to_object($a); 
 echo ($o->foo ); // will print 'bar'
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up vote 0 down vote

In my understanding, I think this is the most sensible way of doing it.

class Array()
{
   public $array = array('foo' => 'bar', 'property' => 'value');  
} 

 //initiate an object...
   $obj = new Array();
   $array = array_values($obj->array);
   print_r($array); //will print 'bar' and 'value'   
}
share|improve this answer
    
This doesn't allow you to have dynamic array contents though. The question was to be able to pass named arguments like the array method to a different, new method that returned an object. –  james_womack Feb 17 '13 at 12:24
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