How do I access this object property with an illegal name?

Question

I'm using a PHP class someone wrote to interface with the BaseCamp API. The particular call I'm doing is to retrieve the items in a todo list, which works fine. My problem is, I'm not sure how to access just the `todo-items` property of the object that is returned. Here's the var_dump of the returned object: ``` object(stdClass)[6] public 'completed-count' => string '0' (length=1) public 'description' => string 'Description String' (length=89) public 'id' => string '12345' (length=7) public 'milestone-id' => string '' (length=0) public 'name' => string 'Error Reports' (length=13) public 'position' => string '1' (length=1) public 'private' => string 'false' (length=5) public 'project-id' => string '58904' (length=7) public 'tracked' => string 'false' (length=5) public 'uncompleted-count' => string '1' (length=1) public 'todo-items' => object(stdClass)[3] public 'todo-item' => object(stdClass)[5] public 'completed' => string 'false' (length=5) public 'content' => string 'content string…

Accepted Answer

```
<?php
$x = new StdClass();
$x->{'todo-list'} = 'fred';
var_dump($x);
```

So, `$object->{'todo-list'}` is the sub-object. If you can set it like that, then you can also read it the same way:

```
echo $x->{'todo-list'};
```

Another possibility:

```
$todolist = 'todo-list';
echo $x->$todolist;
```

If you wanted to convert it to an array, which can be a little more easily (ie the obvious `$ret['todo-list']` accessing), this code is taken almost verbatim from Zend_Config and will convert for you.

```
public function toArray()
{
    $array = array();
    foreach ($this->_data as $key => $value) {
        if ($value instanceof StdClass) {
            $array[$key] = $value->toArray();
        } else {
            $array[$key] = $value;
        }
    }
    return $array;
}
```

How do I access this object property with an illegal name?

Solution

Problem