Chapter 4. Coding Standards
- Table of Contents
- Indenting and Line Length
- Control Structures
- Function Calls
- Function Definitions
- Comments
- Including Code
- PHP Code Tags
- Header Comment Blocks
- Using CVS
- Example URLs
- Naming Conventions
- File Formats
- E_STRICT-compatible code
- Error Handling Guidelines
- Best practices
- Sample File (including Docblock Comment standards)
Note: The PEAR Coding Standards apply to code that is part of the official PEAR distribution. Coding standards often abbreviated as CS among developers and they aim to keep code consistent to be easily readable and maintainable by most of PEAR folks.
Indenting and Line Length
Use an indent of 4 spaces, with no tabs. This helps to avoid problems with diffs, patches, CVS history and annotations.
For Emacs you should set indent-tabs-mode to nil. Here is an example mode hook that will set up Emacs (ensure that it is called when you are editing PHP files):
(defun php-mode-hook ()
(setq tab-width 4
c-basic-offset 4
c-hanging-comment-ender-p nil
indent-tabs-mode
(not
(and (string-match "/\\(PEAR\\|pear\\)/" (buffer-file-name))
(string-match "\.php$" (buffer-file-name)))))) |
Here are Vim rules for the same thing:
set expandtab set shiftwidth=4 set softtabstop=4 set tabstop=4 |
It is recommended to keep lines at approximately 75-85 characters long for better code readability.