How to check that an object is empty in PHP?

You can cast to an array and then check if it is empty or not

$arr = (array)$obj;if (!$arr) {    // do stuff}

Edit: I didn't realize they wanted to specifically check if a SimpleXMLElement object is empty. I left the old answer below

Updated Answer (SimpleXMLElement):

For SimpleXMLElement:

If by empty you mean has no properties:

$obj = simplexml_load_file($url);if ( !$obj->count() ){    // no properties}

OR

$obj = simplexml_load_file($url);if ( !(array)$obj ){    // empty array}

If SimpleXMLElement is one level deep, and by empty you actually mean that it only has properties PHP considers falsey (or no properties):

$obj = simplexml_load_file($url);if ( !array_filter((array)$obj) ){    // all properties falsey or no properties at all}

If SimpleXMLElement is more than one level deep, you can start by converting it to a pure array:

$obj = simplexml_load_file($url);// `json_decode(json_encode($obj), TRUE)` can be slow because// you're converting to and from a JSON string.// I don't know another simple way to do a deep conversion from object to array$array = json_decode(json_encode($obj), TRUE);if ( !array_filter($array) ){    // empty or all properties falsey}

Old Answer (simple object):

If you want to check if a simple object (type stdClass) is completely empty (no keys/values), you can do the following:

// $obj is type stdClass and we want to check if it's emptyif ( $obj == new stdClass() ){    echo "Object is empty"; // JSON: {}}else{    echo "Object has properties";}

Source: http://php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.object-comparison.php

Edit: added example

$one = new stdClass();$two = (object)array();var_dump($one == new stdClass()); // TRUEvar_dump($two == new stdClass()); // TRUEvar_dump($one == $two); // TRUE$two->test = TRUE;var_dump($two == new stdClass()); // FALSEvar_dump($one == $two); // FALSE$two->test = FALSE;var_dump($one == $two); // FALSE$two->test = NULL;var_dump($one == $two); // FALSE$two->test = TRUE;$one->test = TRUE;var_dump($one == $two); // TRUEunset($one->test, $two->test);var_dump($one == $two); // TRUE

You can cast your object into an array, and test its count like so:

if(count((array)$obj)) {   // doStuff}