Calling an object that has a protected property that you need access to? This function will allow you to quickly access data stored in protected properties of PHP objects.

Note: I tested this on PHP 7.4. It will likely work on other versions, but may need tweaking.

Good developers will protect the internals of their objects with private and protected scopes. That means from outside of the object your code will not be able to access whatever is protected. What I am about to show you breaks that encapsulation. Generally, this is not something you want to do, however, if you are working with an object you have no control over, it may be necessary. I ran across this while working with an object from an external library.

This method works by typecasting the object to an array. You can then access the property using a little known method.

Let’s see the code!

    function getProtectedValue( $object, $prop_name ) { 
        $array = ( array ) $object;
        $prefix = chr( 0 ) . '*' . chr( 0 );
        return $array[ $prefix . $prop_name ];
    } 

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