Bug #60873: DateTime properties

Hi, This is not only about https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=60873 :) First of all, I don't think that this bug is a bug. :) It's about accessing undocumented properties that are created as a side effect of calling get_properties DateTime object handler. The properties are probably created to allow debugging and mainly serialization of the object. The problem is that these properties (date, timezone, timezone_type) are publicly available only after calling print_r or serialize or other function that internally uses get_properties handler. This is not exactly a consistent behavior of the object... There are few possible solution to the problem: 1. Making these properties always available. This was my initial idea that is BC and actually fix the "bug". The properties would be retrieved using read_property handler. This is implemented in the PR: https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/393 . It would make sense to also add write_property handler and add warning if the user try to write to the property as this should be done by set* method. The properties would have to be documented of course. It would be sort of similar as xml_dom object read-only props. 2. Making these properties always hidden. There are two solutions for this: 2.1 Retrieving a copy of properties hash table in get_properties: https://github.com/bukka/php-src/compare/date_props . There was actually a props HashTable in php_date_obj that wasn't used so I used it here... 2.2 Using a new serialize handler that I have just requested for addition and get_debug_info. Then return a copy of HashTable (the same as properties). The patch: https://github.com/bukka/php-src/compare/date_serialize I was talking only about DateTime but exactly the same problem is in other objects (DateTimeZone...). I will be happy to write patches for other objects as well after we make a decision which solution is the best! What do you think? Jakub