Comments on: An “Accident” I Constantly See in PHP Scripts

By: Matt Hackett

Matt Hackett — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 06:47:43 +0000

I agree on using double quotes when apostrophes are present, but things being a language’s “fault” are exactly the sort of situations that engineers need to be prepared for. Take JavaScript for example: it’s one of the messiest languages around, but is quite elegant when used properly. PHP has similar traits.

By: Robert

Robert — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:49:46 +0000

It seems logical to me that the double quote should be the bigger encloser and should always be used.

First, several languages don’t like ‘multiple characters’ and requires “multiple characters”
So by being using double quotes in languages that are flexible, you can remain being consistent.

Second, the probability of having a single quote in a string is much more likely then having a double quote.
Thus this is easier and cleaner “book’s” than doing ‘book\’s’

Third, the double quote just seems like it should be bigger and thus enclose single quotes rather than the other way around.

As far as PHP’s parser needing more time to parse double quoted strings over single quoted ones? Well, that’s PHP’s fault and not something that any SANE engineer should ever concern themselves with :)

By: James Urquhart

James Urquhart — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 15:29:28 +0000

Personally i tend to go for the one-true-brace style, as it makes it easier for me to determine where all the “scopes” are when there is a lot of nesting going on.

Still, i also make sure indent my code so one could say that point is doesn’t make much sense.

Thankfully though, i’ve actually been doing a lot of programming in Ruby recently. No brackets there to worry about. There’s still the single vs double quotes issue though. I always go for single quotes unless i need extra parsing.

For other projects, i try to stick as close as possible to the original formatting as i can.