Does PHP feature short hand syntax for objects?

Question

In javascript you can easily create objects and Arrays like so:

var aObject = { foo:\'bla\', bar:2 };
var anArray = [\'foo\', \'bar\', 2];

Answer 1

Like the json_decode idea, wrote this:

function a($json) {
 return json_decode($json, true); //turn true to false to use objets instead of associative arrays
}

//EXAMPLE
$cat = 'meow';

$array = a('{"value1":"Tester", 
  "value2":"'.$cat.'", 
  "value3":{"valueX":"Hi"}}');

print_r($array);