Does PHP feature short hand syntax for objects?

Question

In javascript you can easily create objects and Arrays like so:

var aObject = { foo:'bla', bar:2 };
var anArray = ['foo', 'bar', 2];

Are simialar things possible in PHP?
I know that you can easily create an array using the array function, that hardly is more work then the javascript syntax, but is there a similar syntax for creating objects? Or should I just use associative arrays?

$anArray = array('foo', 'bar', 2);
$anObjectLikeAssociativeArray = array('foo'=>'bla',
                                      'bar'=>2);

So to summarize:
Does PHP have javascript like object creation or should I just use associative arrays?

Answer 1

Not that I'm aware.. And why would you want to? Javascript is so limited in comparison? Objects should be described properly, and with scope and hinting, etc.

Answer 2

I don't believe so, but what would be the benefit of accessing the items like this:

anObject.foo

instead of:

anArray['foo']

Answer 3

There was a proposal to implement this array syntax. But it was declined.

Answer 4

For simple objects, you can use the associative array syntax and casting to get an object:

<?php
$obj = (object)array('foo' => 'bar');
echo $obj->foo; // yields "bar"

But looking at that you can easily see how useless it is (you would just leave it as an associative array if your structure was that simple).

Answer 5

There is no object shorthand in PHP, but you can use Javascript's exact syntax, provided you use the json_encode and json_decode functions.

Answer 6

The method provided by crescentfresh works very well but I had a problem appending more properties to the object. to get around this problem I implemented the spl ArrayObject.

class ObjectParameter extends ArrayObject  {
     public function  __set($name,  $value) {
        $this->$name = $value;
    }

    public function  __get($name) {
      return $this[$name];
    }
}

//creating a new Array object
$objParam = new ObjectParameter;
//adding properties
$objParam->strName = "foo";
//print name
printf($objParam->strName);
//add another property
$objParam->strUser = "bar";


There is a lot you can do with this approach to make it easy for you to create objects
even from arrays, hope this helps .