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Date: Sat, 15 Oct 2022 13:18:29 +0200
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Organization: Parentesi Graffe
Disposition-Notification-To: Gianni Gentile <g.gentile@parentesigraffe.com>
Subject: [PHP-DEV] Casting array to any class
From: g.gentile@parentesigraffe.com (Gianni Gentile)

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Hi,

in my every day experience, using custom DTO classes and different API, 
I often write code to instantiate my objects from associative arrays.

What are your thoughts on introduce the `(AnyType)` cast to instantiate 
objects from associative array (or object properties also)?

In my proposal, if AnyType implements __set_state(), casting should be 
syntactic sugar for:

     AnyType::_set_state((array) $data)

just for (useless) example, consider DateTime or DateTimeImmutable (both 
have __set_state() implementation); when applied to objects of that 
type, we can write:

     $dt = new DateTime();

     $dtArray = (array) $dt; // 3 elements array

     $copyOfDt = (DateTime) $dtArray; // or simply $copyOfDt = 
(DateTime) $dt;

In case AnyType does not implements __set_state(), casting should create 
a new instance, assigning values to properties, taken from array values 
with corresponding key (in a similar way class objects are created when 
row is fetched from database specifying PDO_FETCH_CLASS) eventually 
invoking __set() magic method for properties not declared;

In this scenario,

     (object) ['one' => 1, 'two' => 2]

and

     (StdClass) ['one' => 1, 'two' => 2]

do exactly the same work.


Reasons:

- clear code

- array to object conversion (casting) would be the simmetrical 
counterpart of object to array conversion


Thanks,

Gianni

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