“Trying to get properties on a non-object” in PHP

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I’m a WordPress theme developer and on a theme I’m working on, I’ve turned on debug mode and get this error inside a select drop-down box for the theme’s options page.

The error says this: “Trying to get properties on a non-object.” Here is the offending code:

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 <select name="<?php echo $value['id']; ?>" id="<?php echo $value['id']; ?>">
                <?php foreach ($value['options'] as $option) { ?>
               <option value="<?php echo $option->term_id; ?>"  <?php if ( $settings[$id] == $option->term_id) { echo 'selected="selected"'; }?>>
                    <?php echo $option->name; ?>
                </option>                       
               <?php }?>  </select>

I can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong. The line that’s specifically causing the error is this: 

<option value="<?php echo $option->term_id; ?>"  <?php if ( $settings[$id] == $option->term_id) { echo 'selected="selected"'; }?>>

Thanks for any advice! 🙂

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4 comments

  1. You’re doing this a couple of times:

    $option->someproperty

    In at least one of the cases $option is not an object. When you then do -> on a non-object, you get that error.

    First, verify that $option is actually an object and correct the usage if it is not.

    If $option is an array then @matthewpavkov is correct, you should do $option['someproperty'] instead of $option->someproperty.

    If $option is usually an object, perhaps get_categories() is sometimes returning null or false in a failure condition. Check for that before accessing $option.

    Like so:

    foreach ($value['options'] as $option)
{
    if ($option)
    {
        // do whatever;
    }
}

  3. OK I see what you’re saying. Earlier in my code I have this (overly simplified, just to show the important parts): 

    $news_categories = get_categories()  //pulls all of the categories from WordPress

        array ("minititle"      => '<span class="mini_title">Select the category you'd like to use as your "Top Story" category.</span>',
            "id"        => $shortname . "_top_story_category",
            "type"      => "cat_select",
            "options" => $news_categories)

    This is where $value[‘options’] comes from. The code is part of a switch statement…

    I would have to post the entire file in order to give the context, and it’s quite long.