Question

Within our namespaced class files, there’re various classes which have the namespace prefixed with a backslash and numerous others which don’t.

Is there a difference between the two? Which is preferable to be using?

e.g.

use namespace\ui\User

vs

use \namespace\ui\User

where namespace itself represents the root folder where the namespaced classes reside.

Answer 1

From the PHP documentation:

Note that for namespaced names (fully qualified namespace names containing namespace
separator, such as Foo\Bar as opposed to global names that do not, such as FooBar), the
leading backslash is unnecessary and not recommended, as import names must be fully
qualified, and are not processed relative to the current namespace.

This means that you can, and should, omit the leading \ when importing/aliasing.