title: Call a protected method from outside a class in PHP
body: <p>I have a very special case in which I need to call a protected method from outside a class. I am very conscious about what I do programmingwise, but I would not be entirely opposed to doing so in this one special case I have. In all other cases, I need to continue disallowing access to the internal method, and so I would like to keep the method protected.</p>
  
  <p>What are some elegant ways to access a protected method outside of a class? So far, I've found <a href="http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=34044" rel="noreferrer">this</a>.</p>
  
  <p>I suppose it may be possible create some kind of double-agent instance of the target class that would sneakily provide access to the internals...</p>