note 75290 added to language.oop5.visibility

Sometimes you may wish to have all members of a class visible to other classes, but not editable - effectively read-only. In this case defining them as public or protected is no good, but defining them as private is too strict and by convention requires you to write accessor functions. Here is the lazy way, using one get function for accessing any of the variables: <?php class Foo { private $a; private $b; private $c; private $d; private $e; private $f; public function __construct() { $this->a = 'Value of $a'; $this->b = 'Value of $b'; $this->c = 'Value of $c'; $this->d = 'Value of $d'; $this->e = 'Value of $e'; $this->f = 'Value of $f'; } /* Accessor for all class variables. */ public function get($what) { $result = FALSE; $vars = array_keys(get_class_vars('Foo')); foreach ($vars as $var) { if ($what == $var) { eval('$result = $this->'.$var.';'); return $result; } } return $result; } } class Bar { private $a; public function __construct() { $foo = new Foo(); var_dump($foo->get('a')); // results in: string(11) "Value of $a" } } $bar = new Bar(); ?> ---- Server IP: 81.92.200.26 Probable Submitter: 87.196.104.144 ---- Manual Page -- http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.visibility.php Edit -- https://master.php.net/note/edit/75290 Del: integrated -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/75290/integrated Del: useless -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/75290/useless Del: bad code -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/75290/bad+code Del: spam -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/75290/spam Del: non-english -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/75290/non-english Del: in docs -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/75290/in+docs Del: other reasons-- https://master.php.net/note/delete/75290 Reject -- https://master.php.net/note/reject/75290 Search -- https://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php