Why is this an issue?

Explicitly declaring method visibility provides clarity and improves code readability. This leads to:

• Simplifying access to and use of the methods for other developers, enhancing the maintainability of the codebase.
• Promoting the principle of encapsulation, allowing you to control the accessibility of methods and prevent unintended access or modifications from external code.

By explicitly stating the visibility, you establish a clear contract for how the methods should be interacted with, making it easier to understand and reason about the behavior of the code.

Available access modifiers are:

• private - access allowed only within the same class
• protected - access allowed to the class and its child classes
• public - unfettered access by all (default)

How to fix it

Code examples

Noncompliant code example

function foo(){...}

Compliant solution

private function foo(){...}

Resources

Documentation

• PHP Manual - Visibility
• W3Schools - Access Modifiers