Few minutes ago Brent Shaffer asked on the Twitter

Which is more standard, „public static function” or „static public function”?

I was curious about it, so I’ve checked which convention is used in my favourite Symfony Project. Of course, I haven’t got enough time to check it manually, class by class, so I wrote simple bash script:

egrep "^[^\*/]*static.*function" /usr/share/php/symfony/ -rioh --include=*.php | sed 's/^\s*//g' | sort | uniq  -c | sort -r

The answer  for the Symfony 1.2 was:

685 public static function
181 static public function
27 static protected function
16 protected static function
16 private static function
11 static function
2 abstract public static function

I’ve done same thing for Doctrine ORM Project

egrep "^[^\*/]*static.*function" /usr/share/php/Doctrine/lib/ -rioh --include=*.php | sed 's/^\s*//g' | sort | uniq  -c | sort -r

and the result was:

78 public static function
6 static public function
6 static protected function

Now I can tell that „public static function” is more common, and by the way I use same convention in my classes 🙂