What does the dot mean in Symfony service names?

Question

Look at this documentation page, for instance. Several service names are dotted, and I wanted to know if it means we are searching an object's method or if it is nothing.

Note I am talking about service names in YAML format.

Answer 1

As per the Symfony coding standards guide, dots are simply a separator used to group services but they have no actual significance in code. Often people will group related services, for example:

image.loader
image.converter
image.viewer

This indicates all the services are to do with images. Often people might group these services in the same folder or bundle but that decision is purely up to the developer.