Best practices to test protected methods with PHPUnit

Question

I found the discussion on Do you test private method informative.

I have decided, that in some classes, I want to have protected methods, but test them. Some of thes

Answer 1

I'd like to propose a slight variation to getMethod() defined in uckelman's answer.

This version changes getMethod() by removing hard-coded values and simplifying usage a little. I recommend adding it to your PHPUnitUtil class as in the example below or to your PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase-extending class (or, I suppose, globally to your PHPUnitUtil file).

Since MyClass is being instantiated anyways and ReflectionClass can take a string or an object...

class PHPUnitUtil {
    /**
     * Get a private or protected method for testing/documentation purposes.
     * How to use for MyClass->foo():
     *      $cls = new MyClass();
     *      $foo = PHPUnitUtil::getPrivateMethod($cls, 'foo');
     *      $foo->invoke($cls, $...);
     * @param object $obj The instantiated instance of your class
     * @param string $name The name of your private/protected method
     * @return ReflectionMethod The method you asked for
     */
    public static function getPrivateMethod($obj, $name) {
      $class = new ReflectionClass($obj);
      $method = $class->getMethod($name);
      $method->setAccessible(true);
      return $method;
    }
    // ... some other functions
}

I also created an alias function getProtectedMethod() to be explicit what is expected, but that one's up to you.