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Dan Lugg
Dan Lugg

Reputation: 20602

PHP reflection; extracting non-block comments

I've recently become familiar with Reflection, and have been experimenting with it, especially getDocComment(), however it appears that it only supports /** */ comment blocks.

/** foobar */
class MyClass{}

$refl = new ReflectionClass('MyClass');

// produces /** foobar */
echo $refl->getDocComment();

-Versus-

# foobar
class MyClass{}

$refl = new ReflectionClass('MyClass');

// produces nothing
echo $refl->getDocComment();

Is it not possible to capture this without resorting to any sort of file_get_contents(__FILE__) nonsense?

As per dader51's answer, I suppose my best approach would be something along these lines:

// random comment

#[annotation]

/**
 * another comment with a # hash
 */

#[another annotation]

$annotations
    = array_filter(token_get_all(file_get_contents(__FILE__)), function(&$token){
    return (($token[0] == T_COMMENT) && ($token = strstr($token[1], '#')));
});

print_r($annotations);

Outputs:

Array
(
    [4] => #[annotation]

    [8] => #[another annotation]

)

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1877

Answers (5)

Wessel Kranenborg
Wessel Kranenborg

Reputation: 1440

As you can read here in the first User Contributed Note:

The doc comment (T_DOC_COMMENT) must begin with a /** - that's two asterisks, not one. The comment continues until the first */. A normal multi-line comment /*...*/ (T_COMMENT) does not count as a doc comment.

So only /** */ blocks are given by this method.

I don't know any other method with php to get the other comments as using file_get_contents and filter the comments with e.g. a regex

Upvotes: 2

dader
dader

Reputation: 1314

I was trying to do just a you a few days ago, and here is my trick. You can just use the php internal tokenizer ( http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.token-get-all.php ) , and then walk the array returned to select only the comments, here is a sample code :

$a = token_get_all(file_get_contents('path/to/your/file.php'));
print_r($a); // display an array of all tokens found in the file file.php

Here is a list of all tokens php recognize : http://www.php.net/manual/en/tokens.php

And the comment you will get by this method include ( from php.net site ) :

T_COMMENT : // or #, and /* */ in PHP 5

Hope it helps !

Upvotes: 4

Geoffrey
Geoffrey

Reputation: 11354

A doc comment as the name implies, is a documentation comment, not a standard comment, otherwise when you are grabbing comments for apps such as doxygen it will try to document any commented code from testing/debuggung, etc, which often gets left behind and is not important to the user of the API.

Upvotes: 2

C.Evenhuis
C.Evenhuis

Reputation: 26446

DocComments distinguish themselves by saying something about how your classes are to be used, compared to regular comments that could assist a developer in reading the code. That's also why the method isn't called getComment() instead.

Of course it's all text parsing, and someone just made a choice in docComments always being these multiline comments, but that choice has apparently been made, and reading regular comments is not something in the reflection category.

Upvotes: 5

Cem Kalyoncu
Cem Kalyoncu

Reputation: 14603

AFAIK, for a comment to become documentation it is needed to start with /** not even with standard multi-line comment.

Upvotes: 2

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