🐥 Another way of accessing private and protected properties in PHP

development pattern php

In a previous article, I demonstrated how you can get a private or protected property from an object using PHP.

It used reflection to do it's thing:

<?php
public static function getProperty($object, $property)
{
    $reflectedClass = new \ReflectionClass($object);
    $reflection = $reflectedClass->getProperty($property);
    $reflection->setAccessible(true);
    return $reflection->getValue($object);
}

There is however another way to do this without having to use reflection. You can achieve the same using closures (aka. arrow functions):

<?php
public static function getProperty($object, $property)
{
    return (fn () => $this->{$property})->call($object);
}

You can also use this to call private or protected methods on the object.

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