How to programmatically find public properties of a class from inside one of it's methods

Question

I\'ve got a class Foo with public and protected properties. Foo needs to have a non-static method, getPublicVars() that returns a list of

Answer 1

As you already realized, PHP's build in get_object_vars is scope-sensitive. You want the public object properties only.

So from that function to the public variant is not a large step:

function get_object_public_vars($object) {
    return get_object_vars($object);
}

Calling this get_object_public_vars will give you only the public properties then because it is place out of scope of the current object.

If you need more fine-grained control, you can also make use of the ReflectionObject:

(new ReflectionObject($this))->getProperties(ReflectionProperty::IS_PUBLIC);

Which has the benefit that you don't need to introduce another function in the global namespace.