Backslash in PHP -- what does it mean?

Question

I just saw the use of a backslash in a reference to a PHP object and was curious about it (I have never seen this before). What does it mean?

$mail = new SendGrid\Mail();

If you're curious, here's SendGrid's documentation.

This is a duplicate of http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4075521/backslash-syntax-when-creating-objects, so you can find your answer there. — 11684, May 28 '12 at 17:32
This great post explains in much more detail http://stackoverflow.com/q/4790020/6521116 — LF00, May 11 '17 at 07:27

score 34 · Accepted Answer · edited Dec 20 '15 at 21:01

34

It's because they're using PHP namespaces. Namespaces are new as of PHP 5.3.

edited Dec 20 '15 at 21:01

Peter Mortensen

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answered May 28 '12 at 17:30

ashurexm

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score 19 · Answer 2 · answered May 28 '12 at 17:30

19

It's PHP's namespace operator: http://php.net/manual/en/language.namespaces.php.

Don't ask why it's a backslash. It's (imho) the stupidest possible choice they could have made, basing their decisions on a highly slanted/bigoted scoring system that made sense only to the devs.

answered May 28 '12 at 17:30

Marc B

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Well, backslash was best available choice (would you want to use `:::` or `->->`?). – Konrad Borowski May 28 '12 at 17:33
That could work too, but `->Hello->something()` would look ugly. And I don't think PHP would like having operator mean two things at once (especially so different, when I would see `Abc->def()` for first time I would think it's method of constant `Abc`). – Konrad Borowski May 28 '12 at 17:37
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They shouldn't have used the dot operator for string concat, what a waste for a good namespace operator! – James Lin Jun 22 '13 at 21:24
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Check RFC https://wiki.php.net/rfc/namespaceseparator for how they chose Backslash. – Bijay Rungta Aug 29 '13 at 13:50
I'm so going to create an `n` namespace! But seriously... if you can separate folders and files with `/`, why not separate namespaces and classes with `::`? – Erk Nov 10 '16 at 06:23

score 9 · Answer 3 · edited Nov 06 '13 at 17:12

9

This is syntax for namespaces. You can read more about namespaces at PHP documentation. They they require at least PHP 5.3.

For example:

namespace SendGrid;
function Mail() {
    // You can access this function by using SendGrid\Mail() externally
}

edited Nov 06 '13 at 17:12

ashurexm

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answered May 28 '12 at 17:31

Konrad Borowski

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Backslash in PHP -- what does it mean?

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