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Date: Mon, 03 Aug 2015 11:17:37 -0500
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Subject: Re: Access of protected members
From: me@stephencoakley.com (Stephen Coakley)

On 08/03/2015 04:39 AM, Nicolai Scheer wrote:
> 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
>

This is correct behavior. This is the same behavior that most 
object-oriented languages have, including Java and C#.

-- 
Stephen Coakley