28FebFrom the Array to the Object

The other day working late with my colleague Tudor, who also have a blog at blog.motane.lu, we found that in one point of our application we had to use an object but we had an Array. At this point we found two possible solutions, the first rewrite our code to use the Array instead the object or the second and more sophisticated solution convert the Array to an Object.

The tricky point was that the Array could contain more Arrays so we had to write a recursive function to accomplish our objective.

Tudor, at the end, gave the following method to be able to do the conversion.

/**
 * Recursively converts an array to a stdClass object
 *
 * @param array $array
 * @return stdClass
 */
 protected function _convertToStdObject(array $array){
   $obj = new stdClass();
   foreach($array as $key => $value) {
     if(!is_array($value)) {
       $obj->{$key} = $value;
     }else{
       $obj->{$key} = $this->_convertToStdObject($value);
     }
   }

   return $obj;
 }

Maybe, in the next interviews we will do to our PHP Developers candidates, we will ask about this and see how they solve the problem