Question

What are getters and setters in PHP5?

Can someone give me a good example with an explanation?

Answer 1

This is concept for data hiding (or encapsulation) in OOP. For example if you want to have a certain property in your class let’s say ‘Amount’ and give the client of you class the option to change or extract its value You should make your variable ‘Amount’ private (not visible for those who use your class) and generate two methods a getter and a setter that manipulates your value (that are public).

The reason is to be able to validate data or manipulate it before setting or getting your value. Here is a brief example:

class test {

    private $count; //those who use your class are not able to see this property, only the methods above

    public function setCount( $value )    
    {
            //make some validation or manipulation on data here, if needed
        $this->count = $value;    
    }

    public function getCount()    
    {                
        return $this->count;    
    }    
}