How to check if object is empty in PHP?

Question

I'm reading JSON data with PHP and that data contains empty objects (like {}). So the problem is, I have to handle the case when object is empty in different manner but I can't find good enough way to do the check. empty(get_object_vars(object)) looks too scary and very inefficient. Is there good way to do the check?

Answer 1

You could cast it to an array (unfortunately you can't do this within a call to empty():

$x = (array)$obj;
if (empty($x))
    ...

Or cast to an array and count():

if (count((array)$obj))
    ...

Answer 2

How many objects are you unserializing? Unless empty(get_object_vars($object)) or casting to array proves to be a major slowdown/bottleneck, I wouldn't worry about it – Greg's solution is just fine.

I'd suggest using the the $associative flag when decoding the JSON data, though:

json_decode($data, true)

This decodes JSON objects as plain old PHP arrays instead of as stdClass objects. Then you can check for empty objects using empty() and create objects of a user-defined class instead of using stdClass, which is probably a good idea in the long run.