Accessing Public and Private Data Members in C++

In this article, you will learn about accessing public and private and protected data members in C++.

As discussed in the tutorial “Access Controls in Classes”, there are three kinds of access specifies being used in C++.

public
private
protected

Here we can say that the data members declared in a class may be public, private or protected. We need to write different code to access these different kinds of data members. Data members declared as public can be accessed directly anywhere in the program but private and protected variables cannot be accessed directly.

Private data members are used when we want to enforce encapsulation while protected data members are used in case of inheritance. Encapsulation and inheritance are two main concepts of object oriented programming. Private and protected data members will be discussed in detail in the respective tutorials related to encapsulation and inheritance.

Accessing Public Data Members

The following code shows that how public data members can be declared in a class and accessed in the main function.

In line 8, we can see that the data members declared in class Person are public. In line 15, an object of class Person is declared having name ‘p’. This object can access all the public data members declared in class Person as shown in lines 16, 17, 19 and 20. It is clear from the above code that to access the public data members of a class, we need to use an object of the class followed by a dot (.) operator.

Accessing Private Data Members

Data members declared as private in a class cannot be accessed directly as public data members. As discussed earlier private data members will be discussed in detail while discussing encapsulation but at the moment you should know that we need to define a public function through which the private data members of class can be accessed by the objects of the class as shown in the code below.

You can see that the data members of class Person are declared as private as shown in line 8. Due to the private access specifier, these data members cannot be accessed directly by the object of the class in main function. In order to allow the objects of the class to access these data members, we need to define methods in the class through which the private data members can be accessed by the objects.

To do so, three public functions are defined in the class having names setName, setPhone_number and speak on lines 12, 16 and 20 respectively. These functions are used by the object of the class in main function as shown on lines 30, 31 and 32. The same code will be explained in more detail while discussing encapsulation in a later tutorial.

Accessing Protected Data Members

In order to access protected data members, we need to define parent and child classes which will be discussed in the tutorial related to ‘Inheritance’.

Accessing Public and Private Data Members in C++

Accessing Public and Private Data Members in C++

In this article, you will learn about accessing public and private and protected data members in C++.

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