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PHP Tutorial

PHP Coding Standards

Every programming language has coding standards to define best practices for the developers. Many developers would be working on the same module, and if any other developer has to understand that code, it would be very difficult for him if there is no coding standard followed. To manage the source code for the future and to make it easily understandable, PHP has some coding standards to provide clarity and simplicity. 

Below mentioned are the guidelines that should be followed while writing code in PHP.

  • PHP standard tags should be used instead of any shorthand tags for php code delimit.

  • Standard commenting style, i.e. // for single-line comments and /* */ for multi-line comments used be used and avoid the use of # for commenting.

  • Per line code should not exceed 75-85 characters. Use four spaces instead of using tabs for indentation.

  • The conditional flow statements and function calls statements should be properly differentiated with a space between the keywords.

  • While writing a function call statement, no space should be present between the function name and opening parenthesis.

  • Use lower case letters for variables and _ to separate the words in a variable name. Static variables and global variables should start with ‘s’ and ‘g’ respectively.

  • Curly braces should be in the same alignment for a single block of code.

  • All the methods and functions should not be too lengthy and limit themselves to one page only.