In PHP how can I access a “:private” array in an object?

Question

Up until around 3.3beta1 items in the WP_Admin_Bar Object could be accessed using this type of syntax, for example to change the CSS class of one of the existin

Answer 1

If you dont want to touch the core files, then you have to use Reflection:

$adminBar = new WP_Admin_Bar();
$reflector = new ReflectionObject($adminBar);
$nodes = $reflector->getProperty('nodes');
$nodes->setAccessible(true);
print_r($nodes->getValue($adminBar));

The hackish alternative would be casting the object to array and then doing:

$adminbar = (array) new WP_Admin_Bar;
$nodes = $adminbar[chr(0) . 'WP_Admin_Bar' . chr(0) . 'nodes'];
print_r($nodes);