Lesson 4: PHP – Coding Standard

Every company follows a different coding standard based on their best practices. Coding standard is required because there may be many developers working on different modules so if they will start inventing their own standards then source will become very un-manageable and it will become difficult to maintain that source code in future.

Here are several reasons why to use coding specifications −

• Your peer programmers have to understand the code you produce. A coding standard acts as the blueprint for all the team to decipher the code.
• Simplicity and clarity achieved by consistent coding saves you from common mistakes.
• If you revise your code after some time then it becomes easy to understand that code.
• Its industry standard to follow a particular standard to being more quality in software.

There are few guidelines which can be followed while coding in PHP.

• Indenting and Line Length − Use an indent of 4 spaces and don’t use any tab because different computers use different setting for tab. It is recommended to keep lines at approximately 75-85 characters long for better code readability.
• Control Structures − These include if, for, while, switch, etc. Control statements should have one space between the control keyword and opening parenthesis, to distinguish them from function calls. You are strongly encouraged to always use curly braces even in situations where they are technically optional.