Re: Commandline manual lookup script like perldoc for PHP

Hi Stefan!

Is there interest in a possibility do do commandline lookups of the PHP Manual? (Well, i know i'm interested, that's why i wrote it ;)). A quick search in google and PEAR didn't show anything, so i sat down for a bit and wrote a first version of phpi that allows me to retrieve function syntax quickly without switching to the browser. [...]

Nice work ;) I like it, though I will probably never use it... Some points to consider: - we do have a somewhat working manpage generator, which works from the XML sources with regexps, and generates manpages out of PHP function documentation (see scripts/make_man.php in phpdoc) - we can generate some kind of text format (I guess the 'individual HTML files' format filtered through lynx would be OK) if that does not take much time for our build system, and it significantly helps this command line tool - why don't you run the HTML through lynx before playing with the file? as you expect net connection, you may also expect lynx :) I guess windows users won't prefer your reference browser ;)) This would be better as

     -> relying on the structure of the generated HTML files is a bad
        way (it may change from time to time)

     -> generating a different format for your script takes time on
        the build machine, takes bandwidth to rsync, takes bandwidth
        and time to download for the users and the mirror sites

- I think this would be a nice tool (however I won't use it ;), and if you use PEAR classes then it will probably fit in PEAR (which also means luckily that you should follow some coding conventions and should write documentation for your code ;). I think I answered all the questions ;) Goba