PHP-Parser/doc/2_Usage_of_basic_components.markdown

Usage of basic components

This document explains how to use the parser, the pretty printer and the node traverser.

Bootstrapping

The library needs to register a class autoloader; this is done by including the bootstrap.php file:

<?php
require 'path/to/PHP-Parser/lib/bootstrap.php';

Additionally you may want to set the xdebug.max_nesting_level ini option to a higher value:

<?php
ini_set('xdebug.max_nesting_level', 2000);

This ensures that there will be no errors when traversing highly nested node trees.

Parsing

In order to parse some source code you first have to create a PHPParser_Parser object (which needs to be passed a PHPParser_Lexer instance) and then pass the code (including <?php opening tags) to the parse method. If a syntax error is encountered PHPParser_Error is thrown, so this exception should be catched.

<?php
$code = '<?php // some code';

$parser = new PHPParser_Parser(new PHPParser_Lexer);

try {
    $stmts = $parser->parse($code);
} catch (PHPParser_Error $e) {
    echo 'Parse Error: ', $e->getMessage();
}

The parse method will return an array of statement nodes ($stmts).

Emulative lexer

Instead of PHPParser_Lexer one can also use PHPParser_Lexer_Emulative. This class will emulate tokens of newer PHP versions and as such allow parsing PHP 5.4 on PHP 5.2, for example. So if you want to parse PHP code of newer versions than the one you are running, you should use the emulative lexer.

Node tree

If you use the above code with $code = "<?php echo 'Hi ', hi\\getTarget();" the parser will generate a node tree looking like this:

array(
    0: Stmt_Echo(
        exprs: array(
            0: Scalar_String(
                value: Hi
            )
            1: Expr_FuncCall(
                name: Name(
                    parts: array(
                        0: hi
                        1: getTarget
                    )
                )
                args: array(
                )
            )
        )
    )
)

Thus $stmts will contain an array with only one node, with this node being an instance of PHPParser_Node_Stmt_Echo.

As PHP is a large language there are approximately 140 different nodes. In order to make work with them easier they are grouped into three categories:

• PHPParser_Node_Stmts are statement nodes, i.e. language constructs that do not return a value and can not occur in an expression. For example a class definition is a statement. It doesn't return a value and you can't write something like func(class A {});.
• PHPParser_Node_Exprs are expression nodes, i.e. language constructs that return a value and thus can occur in other expressions. Examples of expressions are $var (PHPParser_Node_Expr_Variable) and func() (PHPParser_Node_Expr_FuncCall).
• PHPParser_Node_Scalars are nodes representing scalar values, like 'string' (PHPParser_Node_Scalar_String), 0 (PHPParser_Node_Scalar_LNumber) or magic constants like __FILE__ (PHPParser_Node_Scalar_FileConst). All PHPParser_Node_Scalars extend PHPParser_Node_Expr, as scalars are expressions, too.
• There are some nodes not in either of these groups, for example names (PHPParser_Node_Name) and call arguments (PHPParser_Node_Arg).

Every node has a (possibly zero) number of subnodes. You can access subnodes by writing $node->subNodeName. The Stmt_Echo node has only one subnode exprs. So in order to access it in the above example you would write $stmts[0]->exprs. If you wanted to access name of the function call, you would write $stmts[0]->exprs[1]->name.

All nodes also define a getType() method that returns the node type (the type is the class name without the PHPParser_Node_ prefix).

It is possible to associate custom metadata with a node using the setAttribute() method. This data can then be retrieved using hasAttribute(), getAttribute() and getAttributes().

By default the lexer adds the startLine, endLine and comments attributes. comments is an array of PHPParser_Comment[_Doc] instances.

The start line can also be accessed using getLine()/setLine() (instead of getAttribute('startLine')). The last doc comment from the comments attribute can be obtained using getDocComment().

Pretty printer

The pretty printer component compiles the AST back to PHP code. As the parser does not retain formatting information the formatting is done using a specified scheme. Currently there is only one scheme available, namely PHPParser_PrettyPrinter_Zend (the name "Zend" might be misleading. It does not strictly adhere to the Zend Coding Standard.)

<?php
$code = "<?php echo 'Hi ', hi\\getTarget();";

$parser        = new PHPParser_Parser(new PHPParser_Lexer);
$prettyPrinter = new PHPParser_PrettyPrinter_Zend;

try {
    // parse
    $stmts = $parser->parse($code);

    // change
    $stmts[0]         // the echo statement
          ->exprs     // sub expressions
          [0]         // the first of them (the string node)
          ->value     // it's value, i.e. 'Hi '
          = 'Hallo '; // change to 'Hallo '

    // pretty print
    $code = '<?php ' . $prettyPrinter->prettyPrint($stmts);

    echo $code;
} catch (PHPParser_Error $e) {
    echo 'Parse Error: ', $e->getMessage();
}

The above code will output:

<?php echo 'Hallo ', hi\getTarget();

As you can see the source code was first parsed using PHPParser_Parser->parse, then changed and then again converted to code using PHPParser_PrettyPrinter_Zend->prettyPrint.

The prettyPrint method pretty prints a statements array. It is also possible to pretty print only a single expression using prettyPrintExpr.

Node traversation

The above pretty printing example used the fact that the source code was known and thus it was easy to write code that accesses a certain part of a node tree and changes it. Normally this is not the case. Usually you want to change / analyze code in a generic way, where you don't know how the node tree is going to look like.

For this purpose the parser provides a component for traversing and visiting the node tree. The basic structure of a program using this PHPParser_NodeTraverser looks like this:

<?php
$code = "<?php // some code";

$parser        = new PHPParser_Parser(new PHPParser_Lexer);
$traverser     = new PHPParser_NodeTraverser;
$prettyPrinter = new PHPParser_PrettyPrinter_Zend;

// add your visitor
$traverser->addVisitor(new MyNodeVisitor);

try {
    // parse
    $stmts = $parser->parse($code);

    // traverse
    $stmts = $traverser->traverse($stmts);

    // pretty print
    $code = '<?php ' . $prettyPrinter->prettyPrint($stmts);

    echo $code;
} catch (PHPParser_Error $e) {
    echo 'Parse Error: ', $e->getMessage();
}

A same node visitor for this code might look like this:

<?php
class MyNodeVisitor extends PHPParser_NodeVisitorAbstract
{
    public function leaveNode(PHPParser_Node $node) {
        if ($node instanceof PHPParser_Node_Scalar_String) {
            $node->value = 'foo';
        }
    }
}

The above node visitor would change all string literals in the program to 'foo'.

All visitors must implement the PHPParser_NodeVisitor interface, which defined the following four methods:

public function beforeTraverse(array $nodes);
public function enterNode(PHPParser_Node $node);
public function leaveNode(PHPParser_Node $node);
public function afterTraverse(array $nodes);

The beforeTraverse method is called once before the traversal begins and is passed the nodes the traverser was called with. This method can be used for resetting values before traversation or preparing the tree for traversal.

The afterTraverse method is similar to the beforeTraverse method, with the only difference that it is called once after the traversal.

The enterNode and leaveNode methods are called on every node, the former when it is entered, i.e. before its subnodes are traversed, the latter when it is left.

All four methods can either return the changed node or not return at all (i.e. null) in which case the current node is not changed. The leaveNode method can furthermore return two special values: If false is returned the current node will be removed from the parent array. If an array is returned the current node will be merged into the parent array at the offset of the current node. I.e. if in array(A, B, C) the node B should be replaced with array(X, Y, Z) the result will be array(A, X, Y, Z, C).

Instead of manually implementing the NodeVisitor interface you can also extend the NodeVisitorAbstract class, which will define empty default implementations for all the above methods.

The NameResolver node visitor

One visitor is already bundled with the package: PHPParser_NodeVisitor_NameResolver. This visitor helps you work with namespaced code by trying to resolve most names to fully qualified ones.

For example, consider the following code:

use A as B;
new B\C();

In order to know that B\C really is A\C you would need to track aliases and namespaces yourself. The NameResolver takes care of that and resolves names as far as possible.

After running it most names will be fully qualified. The only names that will stay unqualified are unqualified function and constant names. These are resolved at runtime and thus the visitor can't know which function they are referring to. In most cases this is a non-issue as the global functions are meant.

Also the NameResolver adds a namespacedName subnode to class, function and constant declarations that contains the namespaced name instead of only the shortname that is available via name.

Example: Converting namespaced code to pseudo namespaces

A small example to understand the concept: We want to convert namespaced code to pseudo namespaces so it works on 5.2, i.e. names like A\\B should be converted to A_B. Note that such conversions are fairly complicated if you take PHP's dynamic features into account, so our conversion will assume that no dynamic features are used.

We start off with the following base code:

<?php
const IN_DIR  = '/some/path';
const OUT_DIR = '/some/other/path';

// use the emulative lexer here, as we are running PHP 5.2 but want to parse PHP 5.3
$parser        = new PHPParser_Parser(new PHPParser_Lexer_Emulative);
$traverser     = new PHPParser_NodeTraverser;
$prettyPrinter = new PHPParser_PrettyPrinter_Zend;

$traverser->addVisitor(new PHPParser_NodeVisitor_NameResolver); // we will need resolved names
$traverser->addVisitor(new NodeVisitor_NamespaceConverter);     // our own node visitor

// iterate over all files in the directory
foreach (new RecursiveIteratorIterator(
             new RecursiveDirectoryIterator(IN_DIR),
             RecursiveIteratorIterator::LEAVES_ONLY)
         as $file) {
    // only convert .php files
    if (!preg_match('~\.php$~', $file)) {
        continue;
    }

    try {
        // read the file that should be converted
        $code = file_get_contents($file);

        // parse
        $stmts = $parser->parse($code);

        // traverse
        $stmts = $traverser->traverse($stmts);

        // pretty print
        $code = '<?php ' . $prettyPrinter->prettyPrint($stmts);

        // write the converted file to the target directory
        file_put_contents(
            substr_replace($file->getPathname(), OUT_DIR, 0, strlen(IN_DIR)),
            $code
        );
    } catch (PHPParser_Error $e) {
        echo 'Parse Error: ', $e->getMessage();
    }
}

Now lets start with the main code, the NodeVisitor_NamespaceConverter. One thing it needs to do is convert A\\B style names to A_B style ones.

<?php
class NodeVisitor_NamespaceConverter extends PHPParser_NodeVisitorAbstract
{
    public function leaveNode(PHPParser_Node $node) {
        if ($node instanceof PHPParser_Node_Name) {
            return new PHPParser_Node_Name($node->toString('_'));
        }
    }
}

The above code profits from the fact that the NameResolver already resolved all names as far as possible, so we don't need to do that. All the need to create a string with the name parts separated by underscores instead of backslashes. This is what $node->toString('_') does. (If you want to create a name with backslashes either write $node->toString() or (string) $node.) Then we create a new name from the string and return it. Returning a new node replaces the old node.

Another thing we need to do is change the class/function/const declarations. Currently they contain only the shortname (i.e. the last part of the name), but they need to contain the complete class name:

<?php
class NodeVisitor_NamespaceConverter extends PHPParser_NodeVisitorAbstract
{
    public function leaveNode(PHPParser_Node $node) {
        if ($node instanceof PHPParser_Node_Name) {
            return new PHPParser_Node_Name($node->toString('_'));
        } elseif ($node instanceof PHPParser_Node_Stmt_Class
                  || $node instanceof PHPParser_Node_Stmt_Interface
                  || $node instanceof PHPParser_Node_Stmt_Function) {
            $node->name = $node->namespacedName->toString('_');
        } elseif ($node instanceof PHPParser_Node_Stmt_Const) {
            foreach ($node->consts as $const) {
                $const->name = $const->namespacedName->toString('_');
            }
        }
    }
}

There is not much more to it than converting the namespaced name to string with _ as separator.

The last thing we need to do is remove the namespace and use statements:

<?php
class NodeVisitor_NamespaceConverter extends PHPParser_NodeVisitorAbstract
{
    public function leaveNode(PHPParser_Node $node) {
        if ($node instanceof PHPParser_Node_Name) {
            return new PHPParser_Node_Name($node->toString('_'));
        } elseif ($node instanceof PHPParser_Node_Stmt_Class
                  || $node instanceof PHPParser_Node_Stmt_Interface
                  || $node instanceof PHPParser_Node_Stmt_Function) {
            $node->name = $node->namespacedName->toString('_');
        } elseif ($node instanceof PHPParser_Node_Stmt_Const) {
            foreach ($node->consts as $const) {
                $const->name = $const->namespacedName->toString('_');
            }
        } elseif ($node instanceof PHPParser_Node_Stmt_Namespace) {
            // returning an array merges is into the parent array
            return $node->stmts;
        } elseif ($node instanceof PHPParser_Node_Stmt_Use) {
            // returning false removed the node altogether
            return false;
        }
    }
}

That's all.