oop - Creating anonymous objects in php

Question

As we know, creating anonymous objects in JavaScript is easy, like the code below:

var object = { 
    p : "value", 
    p1 : [ "john", "johnny" ]
};

alert(object.p1[1]);

Output:

an alert is raised with value "johnny"

Can this same technique be applied in PHP? Can we create anonymous objects in PHP?

Answer 1

"Anonymous" is not the correct terminology when talking about objects. It would be better to say "object of anonymous type", but this does not apply to PHP.

All objects in PHP have a class. The "default" class is stdClass, and you can create objects of it this way:

$obj = new stdClass;
$obj->aProperty = 'value';

You can also take advantage of casting an array to an object for a more convenient syntax:

$obj = (object)array('aProperty' => 'value');
print_r($obj);

However, be advised that casting an array to an object is likely to yield "interesting" results for those array keys that are not valid PHP variable names -- for example, here's an answer of mine that shows what happens when keys begin with digits.