How can I overwrite a protected property of an object? - php

Question

This is the result of dd($followers):
LengthAwarePaginator {#401 ▼
#total: 144
#lastPage: 8
#items: Collection {#402 ▼
#items: array:18 [▶]
}
#perPage: 20
#currentPage: 1
#path: "http://myurl.com/SocialCenter/public/twitterprofile/JZarif"
#query: []
#fragment: null
#pageName: "page"
}
Now I want to know, how can I overwrite #total? I mean I want to reinitialize it to 18. So this is the expected result:
LengthAwarePaginator {#401 ▼
#total: 18
#lastPage: 8
#items: Collection {#402 ▼
#items: array:18 [▶]
}
#perPage: 20
#currentPage: 1
#path: "http://myurl.com/SocialCenter/public/twitterprofile/JZarif"
#query: []
#fragment: null
#pageName: "page"
}
Is doing that possible?
Noted that none of these work:
$followers->total = 18;
$followers['total'] = 18;

Answer 1

You could use reflection:
$reflection = new \ReflectionObject($followers);
$property = $reflection->getProperty('total');
$property->setAccessible(true);
$property->setValue(
$followers,
18
);
For reference, see:
http://php.net/manual/en/class.reflectionobject.php
http://php.net/manual/en/class.reflectionproperty.php

Answer 2

You should make a getter and setter function.
But you can use PHP-Reflections. Like this example:
<?php
class LengthAwarePaginator
{
private $total = true;
}
$class = new ReflectionClass("LengthAwarePaginator");
$total = $class->getProperty('total');
$total->setAccessible(true);
$total->setValue(18);