Are there any PHP DocBlock parser tools available?

Question

I would like to build some smaller scale but hightly customized documentation sites for a few projects. PhpDocumentor is pretty great but it is very heavy. I thought about trying to tweak the templates for that but after spending only a couple of minutes looking into it I decided that it would be too much work.

Ideally I'd like to see something to which I could pass a bunch of files and have it return all of the files, classes and properties and methods, along with their meta data, so that I could build out some simple templates based on the data.

Are there any DocBlock parser-only projects that will help me in this task, or am I stuck reinventing that wheel?

Answer 1

In case someone needs a regular expression (xdazz suggested to try this and student310 commented it works for her/his needs)

if (preg_match_all('/@(\w+)\s+(.*)\r?\n/m', $str, $matches)){
  $result = array_combine($matches[1], $matches[2]);
}

Example (Demo):

<?php
$str ='
/**    
 * @param   integer  $int  An integer
 * @return  boolean
 */
';
if (preg_match_all('/@(\w+)\s+(.*)\r?\n/m', $str, $matches)){
  $result = array_combine($matches[1], $matches[2]);
}

var_dump($result);

Answer 2

You can do this easily yourself with the Reflection API:

/**
 * This is an Example class
 */
class Example
{
    /**
     * This is an example function
     */
    public function fn() 
    {
        // void
    }
}

$reflector = new ReflectionClass('Example');

// to get the Class DocBlock
echo $reflector->getDocComment()

// to get the Method DocBlock
$reflector->getMethod('fn')->getDocComment();

See this tutorial: http://www.phpriot.com/articles/reflection-api

There is also a PEAR package that can parse DocBlocks.

Answer 3

You appear to want a PHP parser that can export particular details of what has been parsed.

Our Semantic Designs PHP Front End provides a full PHP 4/5 parser (as of 2016 includes PHP 7). It parses PHP source code, builds abstract syntax trees, stamping each node with precise location information, and makes them available for further use. One general thing it can do is to print out any subtree back as the original text.

In your case, you'd want to scan over the trees, find the classes/methods/properties (as tree nodes) and print their source text, along with the location information. I think that would deliver exactly what you want.

Answer 4

Just to update the answers. You may also want to check out the phpDocumentor2 project. I think that it's PHP DocBlock parser can be easily extracted as standalone solution.

Answer 5

As furgas pointed out, I've been using phpDocumentor for years as a standalone project and it works fine.

<?php
$class = new ReflectionClass('MyClass');
$phpdoc = new \phpDocumentor\Reflection\DocBlock($class);

var_dump($phpdoc->getShortDescription());
var_dump($phpdoc->getLongDescription()->getContents());
var_dump($phpdoc->getTags());
var_dump($phpdoc->hasTag('author'));
var_dump($phpdoc->hasTag('copyright'));