Sometimes you want things that simply look impossible in PHP. A few years ago I was using the DB library from PEAR. I wanted to add some functionality to the DB_Result class, however since the result object is created in the DB class and the class used for that isn’t configurable, I was kind of stuck there.
I solved this problem by writing a class extending the DB_Result class. The class had which used reflection to pull all the info out of the DB_Result class and created a new DB_Result_Ext object. In the end I decided that I didn’t like DB class at all (nor MDB2 for that mather), so I threw away this dirty code, however I always felt that there had to be a better way in solving these kind of issues.
The new solution for this problem I’m about to show, is really a dark corner of PHP and perhaps even dirtier than the other dirty solution. However the method can get you out of a jam when this situation arises.
PHP has a function serialize, which can create a hash from any type of variable, scalars, array, but objects as well. Using the unserialize function, PHP can recreate the variable from the serialized hashed. If we look at how an object is serialized, we see only the properties and the class name are stored. Serializing an object of the ‘mother’ class, with a protected variables ‘$myvar’, would give the following hash:
O:6:"mother":1:{s:8:"�*�myvar";i:5;}
We see an ‘O’ for object, the string length of the class name, the quoted class name and the properties. What would happen if we would change the class name and unserialize?
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