Creating anonymous objects in php

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?

"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.

It has been some years, but I think I need to keep the information up to date!

Since PHP 7 it has been possible to create anonymous classes, so you're able to do things like this:

<?php

    class Foo {}
    $child = new class extends Foo {};

    var_dump($child instanceof Foo); // true

?>

You can read more about this in the manual

But I don't know how similar it is implemented to JavaScript, so there may be a few differences between anonymous classes in JavaScript and PHP.

Creating anonymous objects in php

Related

Recent Posts