Over on the Blue Parabola blog Matthew Turland recently posted a new tutorial on using the PHP_CodeSniffer PEAR package to check out how well your code adheres to the coding standard of your choice.

For the sake of consistency [on a client project], the development team had stuff with the coding standard used by the framework itself. However, evaluating the code manually is tedious and time-consuming. There's a solution to this type of problem: the PHP_CodeSniffer package from PEAR, which builds an infrastructure around tokenizers for PHP, CSS, and JavaScript and utilities to detect coding standard violations within code in any of those languages.

He includes an example token output (the codesniffer package is based on the Tokenizer) from a script and walks you through the initial setup of the package, how to create "sniffs" for the code you want to analyze and how to run them using the popular unit testing tool PHPUnit.