visual77

Back in July, I wrote an article about converting an object to array in PHP and mentioned the difficulties I was having with filtering private and protected keys to remove undesirable characters. I found a solution not long after, but never got around to writing a follow up. Here is my current function library to convert an object to an array, recursively, while maintaing nice keys.

< ?php

function convertObjectToArray(&$element) {
    // the recursive call can't operate through objects, so they
    // must be handled specially
    if(is_object($element)) {
        // typecast the object to an array, and clean up private and
        // protected keys
        $element = convertObjectToArray_keyCleanup((array)$element);
        // begin the recursion again to go through this object-turned-array
        // this is not strictly necesary, as removing it will cause the
        // recursion to happen in convertToXml, but putting it here makes it
        // more readable and ever so slightly faster.
        array_walk_recursive(
            $element,
           'convertObjectToArray'
        );
    }
    return $element;
}

function convertObjectToArray_keyCleanup($array) {
    // find every invalid key (private and protected member properties)
    foreach(array_filter(array_keys($array), 'convertObjectToArray_invalidKey')
        as $invalidKey) {
        // change the key name by copy / delete / create
        $data = $array[$invalidKey];
        unset($array[$invalidKey]);
        // find out the correct key name by getting the last chunk that
        // is only ascii 32 - 126, the standard set of printable characters
        // User�Types => Types
        $key = preg_replace(
            '/^.*[^\x20-\x7E]([\x20-\x7E]*)$/',
            '\\1',
            $invalidKey
        );
        $array[$key] = $data;
    }

    return $array;
}

function convertObjectToArray_invalidKey($key) {
    // a key is invalid if it has any characters that are outside
    // of the ascii range 32 - 126, which is the standard set of printable
    // characters
    return preg_match('/[^\x20-\x7E]/', $key);
}

?>