Question

Because PHP passes objects by reference by default I’ve run into a little problem that the follow script demos:

$a = new stdClass();
$a->b = new stdClass();
$a->b->c = 1;

$d = clone $a;

$a->b->c = 10;

print_r($a);
print_r($d);

Is there a way to clone a stdClass and also clone any objects that it might contain? I understand I can use the __clone method to prevent this behavior, but my object is being built via json_decode.

Answer 1

I believe the accepted way is to serialize and unserialize the composite object

$d = unserialize(serialize($a));