Getting Started

Set up your PHP Environment (PHP 7.2 and Composer)

Any version of PHP 7 should work, but as we are still in our early stages, the "golden path" for now will be PHP 7.2

Windows

1. Download PHP 7.2
2. Download and install Composer

Ensure your version of PHP is properly configured by running php -v in the command prompt. If it's not PHP 7.2, then you have a few different options for how to access it:

1. reference it directly: c:\PHP7.2\php.exe -v
2. Prepend the directory to your system PATH
3. create an alias using doskey: doskey php7="C:\PHP7.2\php.exe" $*

Mac

1. Install Homebrew
2. Install PHP 7.2 and Composer

brew install php@7.2
brew install composer

Ensure your version of PHP is properly configured by running php -v. If it's not PHP7, then you have a few different options for how to access it:

1. reference it directly: /usr/local/Cellar/php@7.2/7.2.30/bin/php -v
2. alias it in your ~/.bash_profile: alias php7=/usr/local/Cellar/php@7.2/7.2.30/bin/php
3. add it to your PATH in ~/.bash_profile: export PATH="/usr/local/sbin:$PATH"

Reference tolerant-php-parser from your PHP project

The parser is not yet available on packagist, so you'll instead have to specify the location to the github repository.

In your project's composer.json, specify the minimum-stability, repositories, and require attributes as follows:

{
    "minimum-stability": "dev",
    "repositories": [
        {
            "type": "git",
            "url": "https://github.com/microsoft/tolerant-php-parser.git"
        }
    ],
    "require": {
        "microsoft/tolerant-php-parser": "master"
    }
}

Once you've referenced the parser from your project, run composer install --prefer-dist, and be on your way!

Note: The --prefer-dist flag tells Composer to download the minimal set of files, rather the complete source, which includes tests as well.

Ready, set, parse!

<?php
// Autoload required classes
require __DIR__ . "/vendor/autoload.php";

use Microsoft\PhpParser\{DiagnosticsProvider, Parser};

$parser = new Parser(); # instantiates a new parser instance
$astNode = $parser->parseSourceFile('<?php /* comment */ echo "hi!";'); # returns an AST from string contents
$errors =  DiagnosticsProvider::getDiagnostics($astNode); # get errors from AST Node (as a Generator)

var_dump($astNode); # prints full AST
var_dump(iterator_to_array($errors)); # prints all errors

$childNodes = $astNode->getChildNodes();
foreach ($childNodes as $childNode) {
    var_dump([
        "kind" => $childNode->getNodeKindName(), 
        "fullText" => $childNode->getFullText(),
        "text" => $childNode->getText(),
        "trivia" => $childNode->getLeadingCommentAndWhitespaceText()
    ]);
}

// For instance, for the expression-statement, the following is returned:
//   array(4) {
//     ["kind"]=>
//     string(19) "ExpressionStatement"
//     ["fullText"]=>
//     string(25) "/* comment */ echo "hi!";"
//     ["text"]=>
//     string(11) "echo "hi!";"
//     ["trivia"]=>
//     string(14) "/* comment */ "
//   }

Note: the API is not yet finalized, so please file issues let us know what functionality you want exposed, and we'll see what we can do! Also please file any bugs with unexpected behavior in the parse tree. We're still in our early stages, and any feedback you have is much appreciated :smiley:.

Play around with the AST!

In order to help you get a sense for the features and shape of the tree, we've also included a Syntax Visualizer Tool that makes use of the parser to both visualize the tree and provide error tooltips.

If you see something that looks off, please file an issue, or better yet, contribute as a test case. See Contributing.md for more details.

Next Steps

Check out the Syntax Overview section for more information on key attributes of the parse tree, or the How It Works section if you want to dive deeper into the implementation.