Best way to create an empty object in JSON with PHP?

Question

To create an empty JSON object I do usually use:

json_encode((object) null);

casting null to an object works, but is there any other prefer

Answer 1

To create an empty object in JSON with PHP I used

$json=json_decode('{}');
$json->status=202;
$json->message='Accepted';
print_r($json);

which produced

stdClass Object
(
    [status] => 202
    [message] => Accepted
)

which is necessary, because later I have to do this

if(is_object($json))