note 41417 deleted from language.oop.object-comparison by danbrown

Note Submitter: jazfresh at hotmail dot com ---- An addendum to the post below: If you are comparing two objects and you know that they will be of the same type (you're just not sure if they refer to the same object or not), then there is an easier and faster way to do the comparison, and this also avoids the infinite recursion problem with circular references described in the post below. In the constructor of your object, set a "serial" attribute from a global variable that is incremented whenever a new object is created. Then you just have to compare serial numbers to see if the objects are the same. e.g. <?php $FooSerial = 0; class Foo { var $serial; function Foo() { $this->serial = $GLOBALS['FooSerial']++; // Rest of constructor... } // Rest of class definition... } if($bar->serial == $baz->serial) { echo "Same"; } ?>