What are some practical uses of PHP tokenizer?

Question

What are practical and day-to-day usage examples of PHP Tokenizer ?

Has anyone used this?

Answer 1

From a comment in the PHP manual:

The tokenizer functions are quite powerful. For example, you can retrieve all of the methods in a given class using an algorithm like:

for each token: if token is T_FUNCTION then start buffer if buffer is started then add the current string to the buffer if token is ( stop buffer

And the great thing is that the class methods will have the right case, so it's a good way to get around the limitations with get_class_methods returning lowercase method names. Also since using a similar algorithm you can read the arguments of a function you can implement Reflections-like functionality into PHP4.

Finally you can use it as a simpler method of extracting Javadoc out of a class file to generate documentation. The util/MethodTable.php class in AMFPHP (http://www.amfphp.org) uses the tokenizer functions to create a method table with all of the arguments, a description, return type, etc. and from that method table it can generate ActionScript that matches the PHP, but it could also be fitted to generate JavaScript, documentation files, or basically anything you put your mind to. I can also see that this could be the base for a class -> WSDL file generator.

You can use for gathering various informations about some php code, as for example all defined classes, methods, variables, generating documentation and similar tasks.