Question

I’m working on an existing code base and got back an object with an attribute that starts with a number, which I can see if I call print_r on the object.

Let’s say it’s $Beeblebrox->2ndhead. When I try to access it like that, I get an error:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_LNUMBER, expecting T_STRING or T_VARIABLE or ‘{‘ or ‘$’

How can I get that attribute?

Answer 1

What about this :

$Beeblebrox->{'2ndhead'}

Actually, you can do this for pretty much any kind of variable — even for ones that are not class properties.

For example, you could think about a variable’s name that contains spaces ; the following syntax will work :

${"My test var"} = 10;
echo ${"My test var"};

Even if, obviously, you would not be able to do anything like this :

$My test var = 10;
echo $My test var;

No idea how it’s working internally, though… And after a bit of searching, I cannot find anything about this in the PHP manual.

Only thing I can find about {} and variables is in here : Variable parsing — but not quite related to the current subject…

But here’s an article that shows a couple of other possiblities, and goes farther than the examples I posted here : [**PHP Variable Names: Curly Brace Madness**][2]

And here’s another one that gives some additionnal informations about the way those are parsed : PHP grammar notes