Significance of the _ (underscore) character?

[diagnostix]

Hi

Can anyone elaborate if there is any significance to the underscore character being used in the PHP scripts??

I've seen people do...

$this->_myvar;

or $_myvar;

I've even seen some code that does...

echo _("my output");

so can someone shed some light on this??

Thanks

[philipolson]

It's not special, just another character EXCEPT in the case of _() as it's actually an alias to the function gettext(). This strange alias is common for many programming languages.

Some people use $_varname as to declare the variables private but in PHP this has no meaning, they are just normal variables. Nothing special yet but I believe PHP5 (ZE2) will allow for private variables.