I would like to put a little background to this simple problem, so I will say the following:
As such, I handled this problem in a different way at the time, being that when I had to send an empty object to the client, what I did was that instead of trying to send something like this:
{"nombre":"","edad":-2,"colecciones":{}}
Instead you should think about sending something like this:
{"nombre":"","edad":-2,"colecciones":{"F":false}}
This is because PHP
the way in which the function json_encode
encodes possible objects is through associative keys, that is, PHP
it interprets that it is an object and NOT an array when there are associative keys linked to the array.
To understand us better, this is what I would do PHP
to try to achieve something similar to this:
{"nombre":"","edad":-2,"colecciones":{}}
PHP :
$ob = json_encode(["nombre" => "", "edad" => -2, "colecciones" => []]);
echo $ob;
Of course the problem with this is that the end result is:
{"nombre":"","edad":-2,"colecciones":[]}
and NOT :
{"nombre":"","edad":-2,"colecciones":{}}
Then I wondered how I could declare an empty object using json_encode
, since objects are supposed to be built based on associative keys. but of course... in an empty object there would be no key , so PHP will always interpret it []
as an empty array, and not as an empty object when encoding.
Of course, I solved this by placing at least one key in the collections key as a response, this key would be totally useless and totally random, but it would force PHP to interpret collections as a objeto
, in this way it would not have problems on the client side.
This is because in this case I was using Java
a strongly typed programming language as a client, additionally implementing the library volley
, therefore the flexibility was between little and none, and obviously there could be variations in the results (sometimes there would be more than an element in colecciones
, as well as sometimes there would be none, in which case it generated errors due to interpreting the type of the element in the wrong way).
So this problem got me wondering if there was some way to generate an empty object using the function json_encode
, so I wouldn't have to do things like this horrible thing here:
{"nombre":"","edad":-2,"colecciones":{"F":false}}
Is there a way to return an empty object?, and if so, how would it be done with json_encode
?
You can use the StdClass class to create an empty object.
For example
You can review the documentation here https://www.php.net/manual/es/reserved.classes.php