Access object property with hyphen in PHP

$birthDate = $user->{'birth-date'};

Accessing data in a JSON object that was created by the json_decode method using an API response can contain properties with illegal names. For example, in PHP the hyphen or dash - is not allowed in variable names. If you try to access an object property with a hyphen in its name:

$birthDate = $user->birth-date;

you will get the following error:

To avoid this problem you can use the syntax with curly braces like this:

$birthDate = $user->{'birth-date'};