PHP: __toString() and json_encode() not playing well together

Question

I\'ve run into an odd problem and I\'m not sure how to fix it. I have several classes that are all PHP implementations of JSON objects. Here\' an illustration of the issue

Answer 1

Even if your protected variable was public instead of protected, you won't have the desired input since this will output the entire object like this:

[{"b":{"foo":"bar"}},{"b":{"foo":"bar"}}]

Instead of:

[{"foo":"bar"},{"foo":"bar"}]

It will most likely defeat your purpose, but i'm more inclined to convert to json in the original class with a default getter and calling for the values directly

class B
{
    protected $b = array( 'foo' => 'bar' );

    public function __get($name)
    {
        return json_encode( $this->$name );
    }
}

Then you could do with them whatever you desire, even nesting the values in an additional array like your class A does, but using json_decode.. it still feels somewhat dirty, but works.

class A
{
    protected $a;

    public function __construct()
    {
        $b1 = new B;
        $b2 = new B;
        $this->a = array( json_decode($b1->b), json_decode($b2->b) );
    }

    public function __toString()
    {
        return json_encode( $this->a );
    }
}

In the documentation there are some responses to this problem (even if i don't like most of them, serializing + stripping the properties makes me feel dirty).