Why can't my getters and setters in PHP see my privately declared variables? (They're all in the same class)

Question

I'm scraping data on cryptographers for a research project I'm doing for school. I have a really simple class that goes to a webpage, enters each of that page's href links, and writes them to a file.

I'm not actually getting a specific error when I run the code, but right now it just writes a blank file. My issue seems to be that my getters and setters have no knowledge of my private instance variables, and furthermore, my object ($obj) seems to have no knowledge of my getters and setters so I'm a bit confused.

I'm using JetBrains PHPStorm. Thanks to everyone for the help and support

Edit: I've updated the code below and it will run just fine. For anyone interested in using it - this code will scrape all of the links off of a web page and store the contents of each link inside of a file. I'm probably going to end up modifying this to strip out all html so that I only get raw text and then JSON-encode the output so that it can be easily parsed.

<?php
class Scraper
{

    /*
    =============================================
    SET UP THE BASE DIRECTORY FOR SCRAPING,
    AND OPEN FILES TO WRITE INFORMATION TO
    ==============================================
    */

    private $basedir; //BASE DIRECTORY PATH FOR SCRAPING
    private $outfile; //NAME OF FILE TO WRITE TO

    /*
    =============================================
    SETTER FOR BASE DIRECTORY
    ==============================================
    */

    public function setBaseDirectory($base)
    {
        $this->basedir = $base;
    }

    /*
    =============================================
    SETTER FOR OUTFILE
    ==============================================
    */

    public function setOutfile($file)
    {
        $this->outfile = $file;
    }

    /*
    =============================================
    GETTER FOR OUTFILE
    ==============================================
    */

    public function getOutfile()
    {
        return $this->outfile;
    }

    /*
    =============================================
    GETTER FOR BASE DIRECTORY
    ==============================================
    */

    public function getBaseDirectory()
    {
        return $this->basedir;
    }


    /*
    =============================================
    THIS FUNCTION TAKES THE HYPERLINKS OUT OF
    A WEB PAGE AND RETURNS THEM IN AN ARRAY.
    ITS SCOPE IS PRIVATE SINCE IT IS A HELPER
    METHOD FOR GETDIRCONTENTS
    =============================================
    */
    private function grabLinks($contents)
    {

        $last_dir = array();
        $URLs = array();

        preg_match_all("|href=[\"'](.*?)[\"']|", $contents, $match);

        foreach ($match as $key => $value)
            foreach ($value as $key2 => $TheUrl)
                $URLs[] = $TheUrl;

        for ($i =0; $i < (count($URLs)/2);$i++)
        {
            $item = str_replace('href=','',(string)$URLs[$i]);
            $item = str_replace('"','',$item);
            array_push($last_dir, $item);
        }

        return $last_dir;
    }


    /*
    =============================================
    THE GOAL OF THIS FUNCTION IS TO GET THE
    CONTENTS OF EACH FORUM POST AND WRITE THEM
    INTO A FILE. MAY EXPLORE CREATING AN
    ASSOCIATIVE ARRAY AND JSON_ENCODING THEM
    BASED ON NAME = POST NAME VALUE = FILE CONTENTS
    =============================================
    */
    public function getDirContents($dir)
    {

        $contents = file_get_contents($dir);
        $linksArray = $this->grabLinks($contents);
        for ($i = 0; $i < count($linksArray);$i++)
        {
            $contents = strip_tags(file_get_contents($dir.$linksArray[$i])); //GET CONTENTS OF FILE FROM LINK
            fwrite($this->getOutfile(), $contents);
            $debug = fopen("debugLog.txt", "w");
            fwrite($debug, "debug contents: \n\n".$this->getOutfile().$this->getBaseDirectory()." $contents \n\n");
        }
    }
}

/*
=============================================
CREATE NEW INSTANCE OF CLASS AND CALL FUNCTION
TO GET CONTENTS OF DIRECTORY ITEMS
==============================================
*/
$obj = new Scraper();
$obj->setBaseDirectory("http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/");
$obj->setOutfile(fopen("Satoshi_Forum_Posts.txt", "w"));
$obj->getDirContents($obj->getBaseDirectory());
echo $obj->getBaseDirectory();
echo $obj->getOutfile();

Answer 1

Ok, I've been able to locate the source of the problem and I apologize for wasting the time of those individuals who were kind enough to comment above. It turns out that my PHP code was just fine and ran after I made 1 change.

I just started using JetBrains PHPStorm IDE, and loaded this class file into the editor from my desktop rather than the JetBrains' workspace. Once I incorporated the small syntactical changes mentioned by Bulk and Jonathan Kuhn I created a new project in JetBrains inside of the workspace I defined upon setting up the program and all of the warning messages went away (I still don't fully understand why they went away).

I ran my code and produced the desired result. I'll post the updated code in the question with the updates suggested in the comments so that anyone who needs a script like this can use it. Thanks again for everyone willing to help out!