Re: CS question: do private function namechanges count as API changes?

Hi, Jorrit Schippers wrote:

I'm currently working on Net_FTP, mainly to fix some bugs. But as I would like to get used to the PEAR codestyle, I started making the file PEAR CS compliant. One of the remaining errors is that some methods are not in camelcase (such as _determine_os_match). All of those methods are declared private in the php docs, as Net_FTP is PHP 4 compliant. I've read that API changes are not recommended, but do private method changes count as API methods? And should I change it to determineOSMatch(), _determineOSMatch() or perhaps (_)determineOsMatch()?

No, changes to private methods do not count as API breaks. Per coding standards you should prefix the private method's name with an underscore, so that's _determineOSMatch() (or _determineOsMatch(), the standards are a bit fuzzy on proper case to use here).

Besides that, what would be the correct way of keeping line 572 [1] within the required 85 character / line limit? It's a variable defined in the class, so tricks like splitting the string do not help.

You can use preg's 'x' modifier and add whitespace / linebreaks into the regexp, it will also allow comments inside it. And that abomination will benefit quite a bit from comments.