Call private methods and private properties from outside a class in PHP

Question

I want to access private methods and variables from outside the classes in very rare specific cases.

I\'ve seen that this is not be possible although introspection

Answer 1

I guess the reflectionClass is the only alternative if you really want to execute some private methods. Anyhow, if you just need read access to privat or protected properties, you could use this code:

<?php
class Demo
{
    private $foo = "bar";
}

$demo = new Demo();

// Will return an object with public, private and protected properties in public scope.
$properties = json_decode(preg_replace('/\\\\u([0-9a-f]{4})|'.get_class($demo).'/i', '', json_encode((array) $demo)));

?>

Answer 2

Just make the method public. But if you want to get tricky you can try this (PHP 5.3):

class LockedGate
{
    private function open()
    {
        return 'how did you get in here?!!';
    }
}

$object = new LockedGate();
$reflector = new ReflectionObject($object);
$method = $reflector->getMethod('open');
$method->setAccessible(true);
echo $method->invoke($object);

Answer 3

I have these problems too sometimes, however I get around it through my coding standards. Private or protected functions are denoted with a prefix underscore ie

private function _myPrivateMethod()

Then i simply make the function public.

public function _myPrivateMethod()

So although the function is public the naming convention gives the notification that whilst public is is private and shouldn't really be used.

Answer 4

The first question you should ask is, if you need to access it from outside the class, why did you declare it private? If it's not your code, the originator probably had a good reason to declare it private, and accessing it directly is a very bad (and largely unmaintainable) practice.

EDIT: As Adam V. points out in the comments, you need to make the private method accessible before invoking it. Code sample updated to include this. I haven't tested it, though - just adding here to keep the answer updated.

That having been said, you can use Reflection to accomplish this. Instantiate ReflectionClass, call getMethod for the method you want to invoke, and then call invoke on the returned ReflectionMethod.

A code sample (though I haven't tested it, so there may be errors) might look like

$demo = new Demo();
$reflection_class = new ReflectionClass("Demo");
$reflection_method = $reflection_class->getMethod("myPrivateMethod");
$reflection_method->setAccessible(true);
$result = $reflection_method->invoke($demo, NULL);

Answer 5

If you are able to added a method in the class where the method is defined, you can add method which uses the call_user_method() internally. This works also with PHP 5.2.x

<?php
class SomeClass {
    public function callprivate($methodName) {
         call_user_method(array($this, $methodName));
    }

    private function somePrivateMethod() {
         echo 'test';
    }
}


$object = new SomeClass();
$object->callprivate('somePrivateMethod');

Answer 6

Answer is put public to the method. Whatever trick you are going to do it wouldn't be understandable to fellow developers. For example they do not know that at some other code this function has been accessed as public by looking at the Demo class.

One more thing. that console can access the first method writing a command like:. How can this even be possible? Console can not access demo class functions by using $this.