Introduction

The tokenizer functions provide an interface to the PHP tokenizer embedded in the Zend Engine. Using these functions you may write your own PHP source analyzation or modification tools without having to deal with the language specification at the lexical level.

See also the appendix about tokens.

Requirements

No external libraries are needed to build this extension.

Installation

Beginning with PHP 4.3.0 these functions are enabled by default. For older versions you have to configure and compile PHP with --enable-tokenizer. You can disable tokenizer support with --disable-tokenizer.

The windows version of PHP has built in support for this extension. You do not need to load any additional extension in order to use these functions.

Predefined Constants

The constants below are defined by this extension, and will only be available when the extension has either been compiled into PHP or dynamically loaded at runtime.

Examples

Here is a simple example PHP scripts using the tokenizer that will read in a PHP file, strip all comments from the source and print the pure code only.

<?php
  $source = file_get_contents("somefile.php");
  $tokens = token_get_all($source);
  foreach ($tokens as $token) {
    if (is_string($token)) {
      // simple 1-character token
      echo $token;
    } else {
      // token array
      list($id, $text) = $token;
      switch($id) { 
        case T_COMMENT: 
        case T_ML_COMMENT:
          // no action on comments
          break;
        default:
          // anything else -> output "as is"
          echo $text;
          break;
      }
    }
  }
?>