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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-29T10:59:52+00:00

I’m pretty familiar I guess with both Zend and PEAR PHP coding standards, and

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I’m pretty familiar I guess with both Zend and PEAR PHP coding standards, and from my previous two employers no TAB characters were allowed in the code base, claiming it might be misinterpreted by the build script or something (something like that, I honestly can’t remember the exact reason). We all set up our IDE’s to explode TABs to 4 spaces.

I’m very used to this, but now my newest employer insists on using TABs and not spaces for indentation. I suppose I shouldn’t really care since I can just tell PHP Storm to just use the TAB char when i hit the Tab key, but, I do. I want spaces and I’d like a valid argument for why spaces are better than TABs.

So, personal preferences aside, my question is, is there a legitimate reason to avoid using TABs in our code base?

Keep in mind this coding standard applies to PHP and JavaScript.

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  1. Editorial Team

    is there a legitimate reason to avoid using TABs in our code base?

    I have consulted at many a company and not once have I run into a codebase that didn’t have some sort of mixture of tabs and spaces among various source files and not once has it been a problem.

    Preferred? Sure.

    Legitimate, as in accordance with established rules, principles, or standards? No.

    Edit

    All I really want to know is if there’s nothing wrong with TABs, why
    would both Zend and PEAR specifically say they are not allowed?

    Because it’s their preference. A convention they wish to be followed to keep uniformity (along with things like naming and brace style). Nothing more.

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