General developer forum

David ++


I too have felt the same , and have been coding till now in this manner,
it also makes things easier for me, instead of starting a single quote and then double quote inside for making interpolation of variables,i just use a double quote at the start and then end it with the same,many consider that as a bad practice but no body is justifying why.

This will work for single level variable transformations ex:

echo " some text $textdesc , end of text ";

Hi David,

Moodle 2 is making the switch to prepared statements - using placeholders for data in SQL statements.

This means you will no longer have to frequently append values and double quotes would be superfluous.

Here is some more info about the new database layer:
http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:DB_layer_2.0

Cheers,
Aaron

Hi David,

does the double/single quote make any difference really from a syntax highlight perspective?

I think I haven't anything special in my vim configuration causing both quoted strings to be displayed exactly the same.

Just note I'm using php_sql_query = 1 to highlight the SQL keywords differently within those strings but I get both perfectly pink (brown in your example).

In any case, I really think it's a matter of each IDE capabilities how those strings are displayed and that must not be the cause for any change in our coding style.

And, talking about coding... it used to be generally accepted to use single quotes when possible, afaik. It had some (minor I guess) parsing benefits and so on.

Ciao

I really don't like this proposal, for three reasons:

1) I have slight obsessive compulsive disorder when seeing string literals in double quotes. The age old wisdom that, its faster and more memory efficient as php doesn't need to do complicated string parsing makes me feel like i'm boosting performance with every double quoted string converted to single quotes!

2) I don't think we should be modifying the coding guidelines to fix broken syntax highlighting! We surely should be patching the syntax highlighter to do the right thing!

3) In non-syntax highlighted world (or if you don't trust your syntax-highlighter) I think there are readability benefits to distinguishing string literals being properly distinguished.

For example: I'm doing a security audit for SQL injection attacks I have to look a lot more closely at double quoted string to examine the contents of the string deeply to check for variables which might sneak in. With single quoted I don't have to look so deeply..

Great, we have a winner - the single quotes

I think we could wait a bit for the final word from MD and then convert all SQL to this new coding style, any objections? I hope not, patches can not merge due to previous changes anyway.

Petr