Backslash before function name in PHP

[cityuk]

Dear All,

I was looking for advanced PHP OO programming tutorials and came
across www.afascripts.com.

They present nice tutorials, but one thing puzzled me: in some of the
code there are backslashes before function names, e.g.:

\spl_autoload_register(array($autoLoader, 'load'));
\class_exists($classname) || \interface_exists($classname)){
if (\file_exists($file)){

(have a look at http://www.afascripts.com/2011/01/07/basics-1-autoloading/#respond).

What does the backslash before the function name do?

Regards,
George

[Helmut Chang]

Am 14.03.2011 03:01, schrieb cityuk:

> They present nice tutorials, but one thing puzzled me: in some of the
> code there are backslashes before function names, e.g.:
>
> \spl_autoload_register(array($autoLoader, 'load'));
> \class_exists($classname) || \interface_exists($classname)){
> if (\file_exists($file)){
>

> [...]

>
> What does the backslash before the function name do?

It's a PHP 5.3 feature:

<http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.namespaces.php>

Helmut