Useful PHP Tips and Tricks Every Developer Should Know

PHP is a versatile server-side scripting language packed with small nuances and techniques that can greatly simplify development. This guide shares some of the most useful PHP tricks that every developer should have in their toolkit.

Whether you’re just getting started with PHP or have years of experience, you’re bound to find helpful new approaches here for writing cleaner, faster, more idiomatic PHP code.

Using Alternative Syntax

While the traditional PHP syntax of opening and closing tags works fine, PHP offers a few other syntactic options:

The short echo tag <?= allows instantly printing output inline without the echo command or parentheses. This helps reduce visual clutter for quick vars or literals:

<?= 'Hello ' . $name ?>

For large blocks of PHP logic, using <?php alternative syntax avoids needing to end every line in ;. This drops visual noise and moves PHP closer to languages like Python for readability:

<?php
    $sum = $x + $y;
    $html = createTable($data); 
    return json_encode($data);
?>

Just be cautious mixing alternative syntax within the same file to avoid issues. But used judiciously, these alternatives help clean up code.

Mastering Array Functions

PHP arrays contain versatile functions for manipulating data that every developer should know.

array_map applies a callback to each element then returns a new array. Useful for data normalization:

$ints = array_map('intval', $data);

array_filter removes elements based on boolean callback, great for cleansing:

$truthy = array_filter($vals, 'strlen');

There are also functions for sorting, splitting, merging, reducing, and more essential array operations.

Understanding Variable Scope

Knowing the differences in PHP variable scope avoids painful bugs.

Functions have local variable scope isolated from the global scope. Trying to access undefined variables implicitly creates them as globals which causes problems.

Instead, explicitly bind variables from broader scopes:

function sum($x, $y) {
  global $total;  
  $total = $x + $y;
}

Or pass them as parameters to keep things clean. Know when code has access to variables before using them.

Mastering Namespaces

Namespaces solve conflicts between identically named classes and organize code.

Wrap classes in a namespace block:

namespace MyLib;

class Tools {
  //...
}

Then prepend the namespace when instantiating:

$tool = new MyLib\Tools();

Namespaces cleanly separate libraries and application layers. They require more characters but prevent so many headaches down the road.

While there are many more nuances that could fill a book, these tips are some of the highest leverage ways to start writing more idiomatic and robust PHP code. Apply and share these to help the whole PHP community program better.