Single Line Comments

ID

php.single_line_comments

Severity

info

Remediation Complexity

trivial

Remediation Risk

low

Remediation Effort

low

Resource

Code Smell

Language

Php

Tags

code_smell, style

Description

Reports single-line comments that use the Perl/shell # style and recommends the // style instead, keeping comment style consistent across the codebase.

Rationale

PHP accepts both // and to begin a single-line comment, but mixing the two within a project hurts readability and makes diffs and tooling noisier. The widely-adopted PSR coding conventions and the bulk of modern PHP code use // exclusively, so a stray comment stands out as an inconsistency. The […​] attribute syntax introduced in PHP 8 and a ! shebang on the first line of a script are not comments and are left untouched.

<?php
class Worker
{
    #[Deprecated]              // OK — PHP 8 attribute, not a comment
    public int $count = 0;

    public function run(): void
    {
        $x = 1; # set counter  // FLAW — # single-line comment
        # initialise totals    // FLAW — # single-line comment
        $y = 2; // ready        // OK — already uses // style
    }
}

Remediation

Replace the leading with //. For example, change initialise totals to // initialise totals.

References