Do you name your arrays using plural or singular in PHP? [closed]

Answer 1

I normally use the plural form, or sometimes the same way as cited up here, adding List to the name...

Answer 2

I usually give it something on the end like list so it would be

nameList

Otherwise, I make it plural.

Answer 3

Always plural. That way there isn't any confusion when I do...

for each (string person in people)
{
    //code
}

Answer 4

I work in a lot of different languages, one thing that isn't considered is languages which have more than array. i.e person:Person; people:Dictionary. people is not necessarily an array, it could be of another type and cause an error. Also, in some languages the different types will perform better at different operations or possibly have different methods available to them.

Which is why these days in all languages I make the names with the noun singular followed by the type such as personArray or person_arr if you prefer. I generally also include the scoping at the beginning if relevant. Variable names should be explicit enough that you don't need auto complete or ctrl+f to know what it is.

Answer 5

What the others said: plural.

It is even more flagrant in PHP:

$name = 'Bobby';
echo $name[1];

will display o. :-)

I must admit I asked myself the same question some years ago, but showing the plural nature of the array or collection was more important than English meaning when accessing one member...

Answer 6

I would always go for

appleList 
appleArray
nameAppleDict

By having the naming convention done right, it will save a ton of time for someone else to read the code. Since they don't have to go back and check the variable type to understand it.

Having a variable name like:

apples 

could be confusing sometimes (list, array or set?)