When should parentheses be used in require / include statements?

Question

I was given a bunch of code that includes many require / include statuses (mixed between require and require_once ). Sometimes a path has a parenthesis around it, i.e. require_once (JPATH_COMPONENT.DS.'controller.php'); , and in other cases not: require_once $path; .

The php docs for include mention this , but they are not specific. Should I remove the brackets when I find them, or is it okay to leave them alone? When writing additional require / include queries, are there specific cases when should I use them?

Answer 1

You can use parentheses in 'include / require' not because include allows it yourself, but because you can use parentheses around any string or number in PHP to group.

So, for example, "dog" equivalent to ("dog") , ("dog")."dog" equivalent to "dog"."dog" , etc.

Brackets become useful when you use complex expressions that include calculations and concatenations of strings, but in this simple case they are simply resolved and perform an unnecessary and harmless “grouping” of a single string value.

Answer 2

There is no problem to leave them or pull them out, in the end, it depends on the convenience of the developer.

Personally, I leave them. I think it looks a little cleaner and the IDE syntax coloring works a little better.

Answer 3

Both syntaxes are valid. So it is up to you. :)
The documentation explains:

Since include is a special language construct, brackets are not needed around the argument.