I have a class. I made an object. Is it ok to have a class method that returns an class variable?

Question

public class dog{
string name = "Puppy";
public void dogName(){
return name;
}
}
//this class may have mistakes, but that is not the point.

Answer 1

💜 Alex Tușinean 🍇 It is a good practice to declare your instance variables as private and access them through public getter methods. This way you achieve data hiding and your class is well encapsulated.

Answer 2

Hi 💜 Alex Tușinean 🍇 this sounds similar to a getter method. You use the setter method to modify the instance variable and use a getter method to retrieve that value. Yes it is pretty much possible and is used frequently.

Answer 3

Avinesh I did that in one of my project, but my teacher told me about classes protection and I've been wondering, if I can't change class variables just by calling them, what if I make a function for that, so I didn't knew if what I did was good or bad.

Answer 4

yes it's possible,(it's the single way to get the value of this variable if it's private!) you defined a getter, but as it returns a string, you should replace void by string

public string dogName() {
...