Note: this is a reformatted repost of the original, I have my moved my blog and that entry was not in the dump. It needed a reformat anyways...

I had a node which stored user profile data and upon blocking said user I wanted to clean it up. A little bit later I will post the code -- for now let it suffice that I needed to use $profile->{$key}[0][$k] = ''; instead of $profile[$key][0][$k] = ''; . I consider myself a not-too bad PHP coder but this syntax took me quite some time to figure out.

I will remove all pseudo objects in Drupal 7, this is a farce and causes severe pain. Also with the onset of PHP5, object passing is always a reference which will be fun. No more. Arrays are arrays, period.

To sum up user comments, some (demeester_roel and Crell) were defending the objects on the grounds that PHP5 can do better with objects -- we shall see. Adrian, Moshe and Ajk on the other hand are with me and Ajk even offered help in this regard.

Here is the code in all it's g(l)ory:

foreach (array_diff_key((array)$profile, array('type' => 1, 'uid' => 1, 'nid' => 1, 'vid' => 1)) as $key => $value) {
  if (substr($key, 0, 6) == 'field_' && is_array($value)) {
    foreach ($value[0] as $k => $v) {
      $profile->{$key}[0][$k] = '';
    }
  }
  else {
    $profile->$key = '';
  }
}

Commenting on this Story is closed.