Question

This is purely a theoretical question, I know that if someone declares a method private, you probably shouldn’t call it. I managed to call private virtual methods and change private members for instances, but I can’t figure out how to call a private non-virtual method (without using __asm). Is there a way to get the pointer to the method? Are there any other ways to do it?

EDIT: I don’t want to change the class definition! I just want a hack/workaround. 🙂

Answer 1

#include the header file, but:

#define private public
#define class struct

Clearly you’ll need to get around various inclusion guards etc and do this in an isolated compilation unit.

EDIT:
Still hackish, but less so:

#include <iostream>

#define private friend class Hack; private

class Foo
{
public:
    Foo(int v) : test_(v) {}
private:
    void bar();
    int test_;
};
#undef private
void Foo::bar() { std::cout << "hello: " << test_ << std::endl; }

class Hack
{
public:
    static void bar(Foo& f) {
        f.bar();
    }
};

int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[])
{
    Foo f(42);
    Hack::bar(f);
    system("pause");
    return 0;
}