A constant is an identifier (name) for a simple value. As the name suggests, that value cannot change during the execution of the script (except for magic constants, which aren't actually constants). A constant is case-sensitive by default. By convention, constant identifiers are always uppercase.
The name of a constant follows the same rules as any label in PHP. A
valid constant name starts with a letter or underscore, followed
by any number of letters, numbers, or underscores. As a regular
expression, it would be expressed thusly:
^[a-zA-Z_\x80-\xff][a-zA-Z0-9_\x80-\xff]*$
It is possible to define() constants with reserved or even invalid names, whose value can (only) be retrieved with constant(). However, doing so is not recommended.
Accesați de asemenea Ghidul de stabilire a denumirilor de către utilizatori.
Example #1 Valid and invalid constant names
<?php
// Valid constant names
define("FOO", "something");
define("FOO2", "something else");
define("FOO_BAR", "something more");
// Invalid constant names
define("2FOO", "something");
// This is valid, but should be avoided:
// PHP may one day provide a magical constant
// that will break your script
define("__FOO__", "something");
?>
Notă: For our purposes here, a letter is a-z, A-Z, and the ASCII characters from 128 through 255 (0x80-0xff).
Like superglobals, the scope of a constant is global. You can access constants anywhere in your script without regard to scope. For more information on scope, read the manual section on variable scope.