Referring to a property of an object

[george93510]

I have an object and I am having trouble referring to one of its properties. The object is $photo_data and if I do a print_r I get this (long data edited out and replaced with ...):

SimpleXMLElement Object
(
 [guid] => https://picasaweb.google.com/data/entry/base/user/ ...
 [pubDate] => Tue, 01 Nov 2011 05:36:45 +0000
 [category] => http://schemas.google.com/photos/2007#photo
 [title] => exp2Punta Chivato.jpg
 [description] => ...
 [enclosure] => SimpleXMLElement Object
 (
 [@attributes] => Array
 (
  [type] => image/jpeg
  [url] => https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/ ...
  [length] => 0
 )

 )

 [link] => https://picasaweb.google.com/ ...
)

I am trying to refer to url. My attempt was:

 $photo_data->enclosure->{'@attributes'}['url']

which is empty. What is the correct syntax?

[george93510]

Apparently SimpleXML objects are not so simple and can't always be used as objects. I found the following solution from another forum, which seems to work. It uses json_encode and json_decode to convert the object into a standard array:

$photo_array = json_decode( json_encode( $photo_data ), true );
echo $photo_array['enclosure']['@attributes']['url'];

[coopster]

When working with objects you may find var_dump() does a better job of dumping out the object definition and values.

And I also prefer json over xml any day!

[george93510]

Thanks. I did also try vardump, but it gave the same structure. I discovered that the proper way to refer to this object is:

$photo_data->enclosure->attributes()->url