How to access a property of an object (stdClass Object) member/element of an array?

Alex picture Alex · Jan 16, 2014 · Viewed 163.5k times · Source

Doing print_r() on my array I get the following:

Array ( 
    [0] => 
        stdClass Object 
        ( 
            [id] => 25 
            [time] => 2014-01-16 16:35:17 
            [fname] => 4 
            [text] => 5 
            [url] => 6 
        ) 
)

How can I access a specific value in the array? The following code does not work because of the stdClass Object

echo $array['id'];

Answer

Lucky Soni picture Lucky Soni · Jan 16, 2014

To access an array member you use $array['KEY'];

To access an object member you use $obj->KEY;

To access an object member inside an array of objects:
$array[0] // Get the first object in the array
$array[0]->KEY // then access its key

You may also loop over an array of objects like so:

foreach ($arrayOfObjs as $key => $object) {
    echo $object->object_property;
}

Think of an array as a collection of things. It's a bag where you can store your stuff and give them a unique id (key) and access them (or take the stuff out of the bag) using that key. I want to keep things simple here, but this bag can contain other bags too :)

Update (this might help someone understand better):

An array contains 'key' and 'value' pairs. Providing a key for an array member is optional and in this case it is automatically assigned a numeric key which starts with 0 and keeps on incrementing by 1 for each additional member. We can retrieve a 'value' from the array by it's 'key'.

So we can define an array in the following ways (with respect to keys):

First method:

$colorPallete = ['red', 'blue', 'green'];

The above array will be assigned numeric keys automatically. So the key assigned to red will be 0, for blue 1 and so on.

Getting values from the above array:

$colorPallete[0]; // will output 'red'
$colorPallete[1]; // will output 'blue'
$colorPallete[2]; // will output 'green'

Second method:

$colorPallete = ['love' => 'red', 'trust' => 'blue', 'envy' => 'green']; // we expliicitely define the keys ourself.

Getting values from the above array:

$colorPallete['love']; // will output 'red'
$colorPallete['trust']; // will output 'blue'
$colorPallete['envy']; // will output 'green'