Snake case

Snake case (or snake_case) is the practice of writing compound words or phrases in which the elements are separated with one underscore character (_) and no spaces, with each element's initial letter usually lowercased within the compound and the first letter either upper or lower case—as in "foo_bar", "hello_world". It is commonly used in computer code for variable names, and function names, and sometimes computer filenames.[1] At least one study found that readers can recognize snake case values more quickly than CamelCase.[2]

Variants

When each word is delimited by a hyphen instead of an underscore, the practice is popularly known as kebab-case or lisp-case; also, the uppercased initial word character variant is known as Train-Case, and the all lowercased variant is known as spinal-case.[3][4] Screaming snake case is similar to snake_case, with letters written in UPPERCASE, as in: THIS_IS_AN_EXAMPLE.

Languages that use snake case as convention

See also

References

  1. e.g. in Python and Ruby; see Naming convention (programming)
  2. "An Eye Tracking Study on camelCase and under_score Identifier Styles".
  3. "StackOverflow - What's the name for snake_case with dashes?".
  4. "Camel_SNAKE-kebab".
  5. "Rust Naming Conventions".