Download the PHP package nikic/php-parser without Composer

PHP Parser

This is a PHP parser written in PHP. Its purpose is to simplify static code analysis and manipulation.

Documentation for version 5.x (current; for running on PHP >= 7.4; for parsing PHP 7.0 to PHP 8.3, with limited support for parsing PHP 5.x).

Documentation for version 4.x (supported; for running on PHP >= 7.0; for parsing PHP 5.2 to PHP 8.3).

Features

The main features provided by this library are:

• Parsing PHP 7, and PHP 8 code into an abstract syntax tree (AST).
  • Invalid code can be parsed into a partial AST.
  • The AST contains accurate location information.
• Dumping the AST in human-readable form.
• Converting an AST back to PHP code.
  • Formatting can be preserved for partially changed ASTs.
• Infrastructure to traverse and modify ASTs.
• Resolution of namespaced names.
• Evaluation of constant expressions.
• Builders to simplify AST construction for code generation.
• Converting an AST into JSON and back.

Quick Start

Install the library using composer:

php composer.phar require nikic/php-parser

Parse some PHP code into an AST and dump the result in human-readable form:

This dumps an AST looking something like this:

Let's traverse the AST and perform some kind of modification. For example, drop all function bodies:

This gives us an AST where the Function_::$stmts are empty:

Finally, we can convert the new AST back to PHP code:

This gives us our original code, minus the var_dump() call inside the function:

For a more comprehensive introduction, see the documentation.

Documentation

1. Introduction
2. Usage of basic components

Component documentation:

• Walking the AST
  • Node visitors
  • Modifying the AST from a visitor
  • Short-circuiting traversals
  • Interleaved visitors
  • Simple node finding API
  • Parent and sibling references
• Name resolution
  • Name resolver options
  • Name resolution context
• Pretty printing
  • Converting AST back to PHP code
  • Customizing formatting
  • Formatting-preserving code transformations
• AST builders
  • Fluent builders for AST nodes
• Lexer
  • Emulation
  • Tokens, positions and attributes
• Error handling
  • Column information for errors
  • Error recovery (parsing of syntactically incorrect code)
• Constant expression evaluation
  • Evaluating constant/property/etc initializers
  • Handling errors and unsupported expressions
• JSON representation
  • JSON encoding and decoding of ASTs
• Performance
  • Disabling Xdebug
  • Reusing objects
  • Garbage collection impact
• Frequently asked questions
  • Parent and sibling references