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www.it-ebooks.infoCHAPTER 3 • PHP BASICSADVANCED DOCUMENTATION WITH PHPDOCUMENTORBecause documentation is such an important part of effective code creation and management,considerable effort has been put into devising solutions for helping developers automate the process. Infact, these days advanced documentation solutions are available for all mainstream programminglanguages, PHP included. phpDocumentor (www.phpdoc.org) is an open source project that facilitates thedocumentation process by converting the comments embedded within the source code into a variety ofeasily readable formats, including HTML and PDF.phpDocumentor works by parsing an application’s source code, searching for special comments known asDocBlocks. Used to document all code within an application, including scripts, classes, functions,variables, and more, DocBlocks contain human-readable explanations along with formalized descriptorssuch as the author’s name, code version, copyright statement, function return values, and much more.Even if you’re a novice programmer, it’s strongly suggested you become familiar with advanceddocumentation solutions and get into the habit of using them for even basic applications.Multiple-Line C SyntaxIt’s often convenient to include somewhat more verbose functional descriptions or other explanatorynotes within code, which logically warrants numerous lines. Although you could preface each line withC++ or shell-style delimiters, PHP also offers a multiple-line variant that can open and close thecomment on different lines. Here’s an example:Outputting Data to the BrowserOf course, even the simplest of dynamic web sites will output data to the browser, and PHP offers severalmethods for doing so.45