How to solve the missing object properties in PHP?

Question

This is a bit philosophical but I think many people encountered this problem. The goal is to access various (dynamically declared) properties in PHP and get rid of notices when they are not set.

Why not to __get?
That's good option if you can declare your own class, but not in case of stdClass, SimpleXML or similar. Extending them is not and option since you usually do not instantiate these classes directly, they are returned as a result of JSON/XML parsing.

Example:

$data = '{"name": "Pavel", "job": "programmer"}';
$object = json_decode($data);

We have simple stdClass object. The problems is obvious:

$b = $data->birthday;

The property is not defined and therefore a notice is raised:

PHP Notice:  Undefined property: stdClass::$birthday

This can happen very often if you consider that you get that object from parsing some JSON. The naive solution is obvious:

$b = isset($data->birthday) ? $data->birthday : null;

However, one gets tired very soon when wrapping every accessor into this. Especially when chaining the objects, such as $data->people[0]->birthday->year. Check whether people is set. Check if the first element is set. Check if birthday is set. Check if year is set. I feel a bit overchecked...

Question: Finally, my question is here.
What is the best approach to this issue? Silencing notices does not seem to be the best idea. And checking every property is difficult. I have seen some solutions such as Symfony property access but I think it is still too much boilerplate. Is there any simpler way? Either third party library, PHP setting, C extension, I don't care as far as it works... And what are the possible pitfalls?

Answer 1

in PHP version 8

you can use Nullsafe operator as follow:

$res = $data?->people[0]?->birthday?->year;