Reflection is used to gather more information about code during the runtime of the program. This allows code to inspect itself and to make small modifications, which is useful in a variety of situations.
This is possible in PHP thanks to the reflection classes, which are built into core. PHP is capable of using reflection to inspect all types of classes, object, functions, variables and even the recent addition of Fibers. Using the reflection classes we can find out the internal structure of a class that an object is part of, including properties, methods constants as well as what sort of class we are dealing with. Reflection works even if the property of method is private or protected.
Read more here: https://www.hashbangcode.com/article/introduction-object-reflection-php