Are there any PHP DocBlock parser tools available? [closed]

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?

Corespondent

Answer 1

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.

Harl

To use reflection, don't you somehow have to load the PHP script containing the class of interest? How do you accomplish that, for an arbitarily long list of PHP scripts? – Frumpy

@Ira See the example at php.net/manual/en/reflectionclass.getdoccomment.php - if you want to parse files for classes, you can use github.com/theseer/Autoload/blob/master/src/classfinder.php and to iterate over directories you can use php.net/manual/en/class.recursivedirectoryiterator.php – Harl

Answer 2

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);

Cutie

Answer 3

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.

Sphygmograph

DocBlox has merged with phpDocumentor to become phpDocumentor2. – Acclamation

Although I agree that phpDocumentor is good, the OP explicitly asks for something that isn't phpDocumentor – Crigger

Answer 4

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'));

Surinam