Do you keep them in your IDE, or elsewhere? Do you have an app for that? Are they easily shared?
I realized I have no system at all but could use one to make it easier to find code I’ve written and might need again some day.
By snippets, I am referring to any chunk of code / text in any format or language, of any length.
Thanks!
EDIT A DAY LATER: Thanks you all! Reading all these ideas, I got inspired to create my own little web app. Wish me luck… :)
Please, can you give an example of such code snippets? I’m wondering what people consider reusable in different projects.
Seriously. A snippet library seems like a significant anti-pattern.
In PHP, a lot. Unit test are boilerplate 90% of the time, getters and setters (although they can be done via Generate), ORM classes with your default shebang (autoincrement ID), and I could go on and on.
I dislike snippets for code like “key this array by some logic” - this should be reusable via a dedicated helper or service.
Getters/setters can also be done automatically by
__get
,__set
or__call
it’s even possible to write a base class or trait that does this automatically.I am a PHP guru, if you’ve ever got questions I’m happy to help.
Sadly that’s against best practices, it does not work with IDE autocomplete, and neither with PHPStan / PHPCS. You also don’t get coverage from PHPUnit. And renaming a property does not rename the usage across the whole project.
__get
and__set
should not be heavily used, and the project shouldn’t be based on them.Some libraries, like Eloquent, uses them well, but you still need to annotate your class with
@property
if you want to stay sane.Please never do any of this
Nah, it’s actually very useful piping and makes code readable and useful.
Let’s say a function, about 20 lines. Something too small to warrant an external dependency but tricky enough that you don’t want to keep rewriting it.
I have things like a function to read through a file of newline delimited text of key-value pairs separated by whitespace. It skips comments (lines beginning with “#”), and returns the pairs. I’m happy to do a little copying instead of having a little dependency.
It is really really easy to make libraries.