Rules

The following list gives an overview of which rights the PHP project reserves for itself, when choosing names for new internal identifiers. The definitive guide is the official » CODING STANDARDS:

  • PHP owns the top-level namespace but tries to find decent descriptive names and avoid any obvious clashes.

  • Function names use underscores between words, while class names use both the camelCase and PascalCase rules.

  • PHP will prefix any global symbols of an extension with the name of the extension. (In the past, there have been numerous exceptions to this rule.) Examples:

  • Iterators and Exceptions are however simply postfixed with "Iterator" and "Exception." Examples:

  • PHP reserves all symbols starting with __ as magical. It is recommended that you do not create symbols starting with __ in PHP unless you want to use documented magical functionality. Examples: