In this recent post to his site Simon Holywell continues his look at namespacing in PHP with a look at importing and aliasing specific functions, not the entire class.

As a follow on to my short post about namespaces and functions from a year ago I thought it would be worth covering importing a specific function and aliasing functions via namespace operators too. This has been possible since PHP 5.6, but there is a nice addition in PHP 7 I’ll cover towards the end.

He starts with a refresher example of pulling in a namespace and using a method with the "use" statement. Following this he shares an update that just imports the one method via a "use function" call rather than the entire class/namespace. He again refactors this into something more usable (the original method name is quite long) with an alias. He then ends the post with the PHP 7 only trick using the braces to define grouped namespace handling (however, this doesn't allow for function level aliasing).