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PHP offers two syntax for declaring namespaces. You can use a namespace with no braces or with braces as seen below.
Without Braces
namespace foo/bar;
class Any{}
With Braces
namespace foo/bar {
class Any{}
}
Is there a difference in the functionality or behavior of these two ways of using namespaces or do they both work/function the same way?
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Introduction. PHP allows both square brackets and curly braces to be used interchangeably for accessing array elements and string offsets. For example: $array = [1, 2]; echo $array[1]; // prints 2 echo $array{1}; // also prints 2 $string = "foo"; echo $string[0]; // prints "f" echo $string{0}; // also prints "f"
Namespaces are qualifiers that solve two different problems: They allow for better organization by grouping classes that work together to perform a task. They allow the same name to be used for more than one class.
To address this problem, namespaces were introduced in PHP as of PHP 5.3. The best way to understand namespaces is by analogy to the directory structure concept in a filesystem. The directory which is used to group related files serves the purpose of a namespace.
Namespaces are used to organize code into logical groups and to prevent name collisions that can occur especially when your code base includes multiple libraries.
There are different reasons for each case, there is a good example on the PHP site.
The reason you'd use curly brackets around a namespace is if there are multiple namespaces in the one file or where you need to have global non-namespaced code in the same file as code that is contained within a namespace.
Also if there are multiple namespaces in one file, the non-bracketed syntax is allowed as well.
As per php guidelines this is not recommended and if you can, just keep it to one namespace per file.
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In the first variant, you can only use one namespace per file, whereas the second allows for multiple namespaces. They can be used interchangeably and may occur multiple times in a single file to define multiple namespaces. The only reason to use curly braces is in this case:
namespace {
// code is in global scope
}
Other than the above example, a potential downside of having multiple namespaces in a single file is autoloaders that use the directory and file names to resolve classes to load; it's therefore not recommended to have more than one namespace per file, unless you're combining multiple script files into one.
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