Importing classes and namespaces in PHP: What difference does a leading backslash make?

Question

What\'s the difference between those two:

use Exception;
use \\Exception;

Or those:

use Foo\\Bar;
use \\Foo\\Bar;
         


        

Answer 1

le't say we have

namespace MyNamespace
use Exception;
use \Exception;

then the first use actually imports class MyNamespace\Exception and the second one just the main class \Exception

so you can have something like

namespace MyNamespace;
class Exception extends \Exception{ }

and then I can

throw new \Exception('Exception from global namespace');
throw new \MyNamespace\Exception('Exception from MyNamespace');