note 69361 deleted from language.oop5.magic by cmb

Note Submitter: jstubbs at work-at dot co dot jp ---- $myclass->foo['bar'] = 'baz'; When overriding __get and __set, the above code can work (as expected) but it depends on your __get implementation rather than your __set. In fact, __set is never called with the above code. It appears that PHP (at least as of 5.1) uses a reference to whatever was returned by __get. To be more verbose, the above code is essentially identical to: $tmp_array = &$myclass->foo; $tmp_array['bar'] = 'baz'; unset($tmp_array); Therefore, the above won't do anything if your __get implementation resembles this: function __get($name) { return array_key_exists($name, $this->values) ? $this->values[$name] : null; } You will actually need to set the value in __get and return that, as in the following code: function __get($name) { if (!array_key_exists($name, $this->values)) $this->values[$name] = null; return $this->values[$name]; }