John Davidson

Message:

I'm trying to do some experiments with arrays and objects to improve my PHP programming basics.

What I would like to do is to save a collection of objects instantiated by one of my classes in a text file to be able to fetch them later.

My current implementation is to save the objects in an array, encode the array and save it to a JSON file.
However, the problem that arises is that when I then go to extract the objects these are no longer objects deriving from my class but are transformed into stdClass objects.

Here is the method I use to save objects to the file:

public function store(string $titolo, string $nomeAutore, string $titoloToDoList): void

    {

        FileChecker::FindOrBuild('Data/Tasks.json', "[]");



        $newTask = new Task($titolo, $nomeAutore, $titoloToDoList);

        $file = file_get_contents('Data/Tasks.json');

        $decodedFile = json_decode($file);

        array_push($decodedFile, $newTask->toArray());

        file_put_contents('Data/Tasks.json', json_encode($decodedFile));



        FileChecker::FindOrBuild('log/log.txt', "Logs: \n");

        Logger::logTaskStore($nomeAutore, $titoloToDoList);

    }

and then I extract from the file with a simple json_decode ()

Can anyone suggest some alternative method to save objects in a text file without losing the class?

edit:
forgot to put the toArray() code which is simply

public function toArray(): array

    {

        return get_object_vars($this);

    }

---

My Answer:
'[]');

$tasks = json_decode(file_get_contents('Data/Tasks.json'));

$task = new Task($titolo, $nomeAutore, $titoloToDoList);
$tasks[] = $task;

file_put_contents('Data/Tasks.json', json_encode($tasks));
}

And here is the method I use to fetch the objects from the file:

public function fetch(): array
{
$tasks = json_decode(file_get_contents('Data/Tasks.json'));

$result = [];

foreach ($tasks as $task) {
$result[] = (object) $task;
}

return $result;
}

As you can see, in the fetch method, I am casting each task object to a stdClass object, which is not what I want.

Is there a way to fetch the objects from the file without losing their original class?