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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-18T11:03:00+00:00

Having done a bit of research, I eventually came across the answer to a

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Having done a bit of research, I eventually came across the answer to a question I was soon to ask here anyways; How do you work with arrays via the __get and __set magic methods in PHP? Whenever I was trying to set a value using something like $object->foo['bar'] = 42; it seemed to silently discard it.

Anyways, the answer is simple; The __get method simply needs to return by reference. And after tossing an ampersand in front of it, sure enough it works.

My question actually, is why? I can’t seem to understand why this is working. How does __get returning by reference affect __set working with multidimensional arrays?

Edit: By the way, running PHP 5.3.1

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    In this particular case, __set is not actually getting called. If you break down what it happening, it should make a bit more sense:

    $tmp = $object->__get('foo');
$tmp['bar'] = 42

    If __get did not return a reference, then instead of assigning 42 to the ‘bar’ index of the original object, you’re be assigning to the ‘bar’ index of a copy of the original object.

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