Cloning objects that contain objects

Question

Because PHP passes objects by reference by default I've run into a little problem that the follow script demos:

$a = new stdClass();
$a->b = new stdClass();
$a->b->c = 1;

$d = clone $a;

$a->b->c = 10;

print_r($a);
print_r($d);

Is there a way to clone a stdClass and also clone any objects that it might contain? I understand I can use the __clone method to prevent this behavior, but my object is being built via json_decode.

Answer 1

I believe the accepted way is to serialize and unserialize the composite object

$d = unserialize(serialize($a));

Answer 2

Since you already have the JSON, why don't you just create all your objects directly from the JSON

Another hacky way to "deep clone" (i.e. by not adding __clone() methods to the objects) would also be to do:

$object_b = unserialize(serialize($object_a));

Or, since you are dealing all with stdClass objects that are nested:

$object_b = json_decode(json_encode($object_a));