Underscore method prefix

Question

I\'ve been examining the code of CodeIgniter and CakePHP and I noticed that some of the methods in their classes are prefixed with an underscore _ or a double u

Answer 1

I'm not familiar with CakePHP or CodeIgniter, but I think they should be regarded as protected or private for non-CakePHP classes. They are probably public as they can be called from other classes, making some kind of hack. Please note that __get, __construct and other magic methods (as noted above) exists in PHP.