Re: PHP_Parser class - any plans?

This would definitely be interesting, and I can see many potential uses for such a class/extension. It would probably be wisest to reuse the Zend engine as much as possible, for speed reasons, and to try to avoid duplicating efforts on a likely significantly sized project (if one were to rewrite the parser entirely in php-land). Lux On Thu, 2002-05-16 at 12:19, Simon Willison wrote: > Are there any plans to put together a PEAR tool for parsing and > "understanding" PHP scripts? Several times over the past few months I have > come across situations where such a thing could be useful, mostly related > to documentation. For example, a well written parser class could allow the > construction of a tool like lxr (as used on http://lxr.php.net/ > ) for > "browsing" PHP source code. It could also be very useful for writing > debuggers, profilers and other development tools. > > I have no experience of language parsing at all but I imagine it's a lot > more complicated than just putting together a few regular expressions. Is > it even viable to write such a thing in PHP or would it make more sense to > write it as a C extension (perhaps for PECL) that re-uses some of the > parsing code from the actual Zend engine? > > In fact now that I think about it PHP's built in syntax highlighting > functions must have access to a parser of some sort. How hard would it be > to add an interface to this parser (I would have thought this is straying > in to PHP development territory as opposed to PEAR). > > Regards, > > Simon Willison > > > -- > PEAR Development Mailing List (http://pear.php.net/) > To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php > > >