In this tutorial we will see the how to avoid exposing the public properites of any class in oop as it is always a good practice to use encapsulation while coding.One of the main advantage of hide the public properties is that if we want to make some change in a code it can be done in isolation and that will have no effect on other area of the code. The best way for hiding the public properties is to put all the fields as private and expose these fields with the help of public accessors.Below is the example of how to use public accessors:

Example:

//This is the example of code where we directly access the public properties

class Employee
{
    public $firstName;
    public $lastName;
    public $city;
}

$emply = new Employee();
$emply->firstName = "Peter"; 
$emply->lastName = "Goomes";
$emply->city = "xyz";
echo "FirstName:"; echo($emply->firstName);echo "<br>";
echo "LastName:";  echo($emply->lastName);echo "<br>";
echo "City:";      echo($emply->city);

OUTPUT:

FirstName:Peter
LastName:Goomes
City:xyz

Below is the example where we use accessors for accessing the private properties

class Employee
{
    private $firstName;
    private $lastName;
    private $city;

    public function setFirstName($firstname)
    {
        $this->firstName = $firstname;
    }

    public function getFirstName()
    {
        return $this->firstName;
    }

    public function setLastName($lastname)
    {
        $this->lastName = $lastname;
    }

    public function getLastName() 
    {
        return $this->lastName;
    }

    public function setCity($city)
    {
        $this->city = $city;

    }

    public function getCity()
    {
        return $this->city;
    }

}

$emply = new Employee();
$emply->setFirstName("Peter");
$emply->setLastName("Goomes");
$emply->setCity("xyz");
echo "FirstName:"; echo($emply->getFirstName());echo "<br>";
echo "LastName:";  echo($emply->getLastName());echo "<br>";
echo "City:";      echo($emply->getCity());

OUTPUT:

FirstName:Peter
LastName:Goomes
City:xyz