Deserializing from JSON into PHP, with casting?

Question

Suppose I have a User class with \'name\' and \'password\' properties, and a \'save\' method. When serializing an object of this class to JSON via json_encode, the method is pro

Answer 1

To answer your direct question, no, there's no was to do this with json_encode/json_decode. JSON was designed and specified to be a format for encoding information, and not for serializing objects. The PHP function don't go beyond that.

If you're interested in recreating objects from JSON, one possible solution is a static method on all the objects in your hierarchy that accepts a stdClass/string and populates variables that looks something like this

//semi pseudo code, not tested
static public function createFromJson($json){
    //if you pass in a string, decode it to an object
    $json = is_string($json) ? json_decode($json) : $json;

    foreach($json as $key=>$value){
        $object = new self();
        if(is_object($value)){
            $object->{$key} = parent::createFromJson($json);
        }
        else{
            $object->{$key} = $value;
        }
    }

    return $object;
}

I didn't test that, but I hope it gets the idea across. Ideally, all your objects should extend from some base object (usually named "class Object") so you can add this code in one place only.