Array in Object passed by value?

Question

Maybe I am overlooking something, but I stumbled across this:

$employees = new stdClass();

$employee_id = 5;
$employee = array();
$employee["id"] = $employee_id;
$employee["name"] = "John;

$employees->$employee_id = $employee;

Now I want to change the employee Name:

$employee = $employees->$employee_id;
$employee["name"] = "Tom";

Now I have two problems:

1. The employee object seems not to be passed by reference, because the employee within the employees is still named John.

2. How would I retrieve the employee name? echo {$employee->$employee_id}["name"]; does not work

Thanks for the help,

Martin

Answer 1

1) PHP does rarely pass by reference. If you want to force a pass by reference, use the =& operator:

$employees->$employee_id =& $employee;

Read more here: http://php.net/references

2) To use $employees->$employee_id in the first place is rather ugly, but here is a possible solution:

$current_employee =& $employee->$employee_id;
echo $current_employee['name'];

Answer 2

You have an extra $ that should not be there.

//$employees->$employee_id = $employee;     Wrong
$employees->employee_id = $employee;

With the dollar, php uses the value of var. eg...

$name = "car";
$obj->car = 5;
$obj->$name = 10;

echo $obj->car;  // outputs 10