What is Encapsulation in Object Oriented Programming (OOPS) Languages?
Encapsulation is the procedure of covering up of data and functions into a single unit. Encapsulation (also information hiding) consists of separating the external aspects of an object which are accessible to other objects, from the internal implementation details of the object, which are hidden from other objects.
A process, encapsulation means the act of enclosing one or more items within a (physical or logical) container (Class).
Object-oriented programming is based on encapsulation. When an objects state and behavior are kept together, they are encapsulated. That is, the data that represents the state of the object and the methods (Functions and Subs) that manipulate that data are stored together as a cohesive unit.
The object takes requests from other client objects, but does not expose its the details of its data or code to them.
The object alone is responsible for its own state, exposing public messages for clients, and declaring private methods that make up its implementation. The client depends on the (hopefully) simple public interface, and does not know about or depend on the details of the
implementation.
For example, a HashTable object will take get() and set() requests from other objects, but does not expose its internal hash table data structures or the code strategies that it uses.