Question

Sometimes I see php comments with ‘@’ in front of some lines. Like @Author. Is there any particular reason for this? I cannot seem to find anything about this. I am assuming there is highly used parser that looks for ‘@’s.

Answer 1

This is most likely phpDocumentor notation, a program which parses source code (and those @ comments) to auto-generate documentation. Many IDEs also provide intelligent lookup and autocomplete functionality based on these comments.

Example:

/**
 * Echoes "example".
 * @author Pekka
 * @version 1.5
 * @return void
 */
 function example()
  {
   echo "example";
  }