Question

Suppose I have an object in PHP $o, about which I can get $o->a->b, or maybe $0->c[‘d’].

Is there a way of storing these as sort of address for handling elsewhere?

What I have is that at several different places I need to process different properties of the object, but in the same way.

So what I’d like to do is build a collection of addresses as I go along, and then hand them all to a single function which goes through them all and does the processing.

Eg:

$o->a = ‘red’;

$o->b->c = ‘red’;

$o->d[‘e’] = ‘red’;

… and I want to change all ‘red’ to ‘green’, but those particular keys and properties may change depending on circumstances.

Answer 1

You can do this:

$propertyName = 'a';
$o->$propertyName = 'green';

But not this:

$propertyName = 'b->c';
$o->$propertyName = 'green';

Alternatively, you can create references to the variables, like this:

$a[] = & $o->a;
$a[] = & $o->b->c;
$a[] = & $o->d['e'];

foreach ($a as $key => $color) {
    $a[$key] = 'green';
}