Type conversion between PHP client and Java webservice

Question

I have a web service implemented as EJB. One of its methods returns Map<String,String>. On client side I use php :

$client = new SoapClient($wsdl,array("cache_wsdl"=>WSDL_CACHE_NONE));
$result = $client->foo($params);

Everything works fine, but I would like $result->return to be an associative array. Now it looks like

array(10) { [0]=> object(stdClass)#46 (2) { ["key"]=> string(4) "key1" 
["value"]=> string(4) "val1" } .... 

I want

array(10) {"key1"=>"value1", "key2"=>"value2", .... }

The obvious solution is to iterate through this array and create a new array

$arr = array();
foreach ($result->return as $val)  
    $arr[$val->key] = $val->value;

But I wonder if there is a better way to get an assosicative array ?
Thanks in advance.