Detect if an object property is private in PHP

Question

I\'m trying to make a PHP (5) object that can iterate through its properties, building an SQL query based only on its public properties, not its private ones.

As this pa

Answer 1

If you cast the object to an array before iterating over it, the private and protected members will have special prefixes:

class Test{
  public $a = 1;
  private $b = 1;
  protected $c = 1;
}
$a = new Test();
var_dump((array) $a);

displays this:

array(3) {
  ["a"]=>
  int(1)
  ["Testb"]=>
  int(1)
  ["*c"]=>
  int(1)
}

There are hidden characters there too, that don't get displayed. But you can write code to detect them. For example, the regular expression /\0\*\0(.*)$/ will match protected keys, and /\0.*\0(.*)$/ will match private ones. In both, the first capturing group matches the member name.