Search in multidimensional Stdclass PHP - php

Question

I want to search in PHP within a specific object. For instance [module] => play in a StdClass object, how can I search for values within the class itself?
Below you can find the whole array:
[flow] => stdClass Object
(
[data] => stdClass Object
(
[action] => start
)
[module] => record_call
[children] => stdClass Object
(
[_] => stdClass Object
(
[data] => stdClass Object
(
[id] => 7696364e90822fdcba4feee30574a7e2
[endless_playback] =>
[terminators] => Array
(
[0] => 1
)
)
[module] => play
[children] => stdClass Object
(
[_] => stdClass Object
….
I want to get the output like:
[data] => stdClass Object
(
[id] => 7696364e90822fdcba4feee30574a7e2
[endless_playback] =>
[terminators] => Array
(
[0] => 1
)
)
[module] => play
[children] => stdClass Object
(
[_] => stdClass Object
….
Can someone help me with that? Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

You have a couple of simpler options here.
The first is if you're receiving this data via a json_decode() call, add true as a second parameter:
$decoded = json_decode($data, true);
The second is to convert this to a simple associative array structure by taking advantage of the above and the use of json_encode():
$decoded = json_decode(json_encode($data), true);
With your simple array structure, it's now possible to recursively traverse the array to find the matching key/value pair desired:
function findModule($data, $module_name) {
if(!is_array($data)) return null;
if(array_key_exists('module', $data)) {
if($data['module'] === $module_name) {
return $data;
}
}
foreach($data as $key=>$val) {
$result = findModule($val, $module_name);
if(!is_null($result)) {
return $result;
}
}
return null;
}
// Will either return the array of array('data'=>..., 'module'=>'play', 'children': ...) or null if no matching module found.
$module = findModule($decoded, 'play');