PHP - recursive Array to Object?

As far as I can tell, there is no prebuilt solution for this, so you can just roll your own:

function array_to_object($array) {
   $obj = new stdClass();

   foreach ($array as $k => $v) {
      if (strlen($k)) {
         if (is_array($v)) {
            $obj->{$k} = array_to_object($v); //RECURSION
         } else {
            $obj->{$k} = $v;
         }
      }
   }
   
   return $obj;
}

You and many others have pointed to the JSON built-in functions, json_decode() and json_encode(). The method which you have mentioned works, but not completely: it won't convert indexed arrays to objects, and they will remain as indexed arrays. However, there is a trick to overcome this problem. You can use JSON_FORCE_OBJECT constant:

// Converts an array to an object recursively
$object = json_decode(json_encode($array, JSON_FORCE_OBJECT));

Tip: Also, as mentioned here, you can convert an object to array recursively using JSON functions:

// Converts an object to an array recursively
$array = json_decode(json_encode($object), true));    

Important Note: If you do care about performance, do not use this method. While it is short and clean, but it is the slowest among alternatives. See my other answer in this thread relating this.


I know this answer is coming late but I'll post it for anyone who's looking for a solution.

Instead of all this looping etc, you can use PHP's native json_* function. I've got a couple of handy functions that I use a lot

/**
 * Convert an array into a stdClass()
 * 
 * @param   array   $array  The array we want to convert
 * 
 * @return  object
 */
function arrayToObject($array)
{
    // First we convert the array to a json string
    $json = json_encode($array);

    // The we convert the json string to a stdClass()
    $object = json_decode($json);

    return $object;
}


/**
 * Convert a object to an array
 * 
 * @param   object  $object The object we want to convert
 * 
 * @return  array
 */
function objectToArray($object)
{
    // First we convert the object into a json string
    $json = json_encode($object);

    // Then we convert the json string to an array
    $array = json_decode($json, true);

    return $array;
}

Hope this can be helpful