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Date: Mon, 3 Aug 2015 11:39:05 +0200
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Subject: Access of protected members
From: nicolai.scheer@gmail.com (Nicolai Scheer)

Hi,

just stumbled upon a strange issue.
I always thought that protected/private member variables can only be
altered from inside the object.

This example shows, that this is not true:

class Test
{
    protected $member = null;

    public static function getObj()
    {
        $myself = new Test();
        $myself->member = "hello world";
        return $myself;
    }
}

$new_object = Test::getObj();
var_dump( $new_object );

The output is:
object(Test)#1 (1) {
  ["member":protected]=>
  string(11) "hello world"
}

Of course, I'm "inside" the right class, nevertheless, the object
stored in $myself should not allow direct access to its members.

Is this the expected behaviour? Code of this kind is used quite
frequently for factory methods.

Greetings

Nico