Parsing PHP in D.

I keep meaning to write a full log of the whole mythtv experience, as the number of hardware headaches that that has gone through is enough for at least 4 or 5 posts (including the need to rebuild from scratch this whole server a few weeks ago due to hard disk failures from overheating..). But this week, for what seems like the first time this year, I actually scraped 2 days to work on yet another new pet project. Phpmole's replacement....

Phpmole is my lifeblood for development, when I wrote it, I added all the features that where missing from other editors, and the resulting editor made a huge difference to my productivity.

• code folding
  Although annoying at times, is a good way to dive into new code.
• autocompletion
  look up PHP functions / variable names etc.
• inline help hints
  show the signature of a php method inline.
• List of open files on a left bar.
  Since I often have 30+ files open, this is very usefull to flip between them.
• Standard editor features, like syntax highlighting etc.
  

However Phpmoles code base is now pretty old, and was written before I did much PEAR work (eg. it's messy....). There are alot of design decisions that related to PHPGTK1, and the need at the time to implement file transports (ssh/midgard/file) etc. Which are now redundant as things like sshfs do that much better.

So I've started hacking on leds, the editor I mentioned before when hacking on D. It has the benefit of being relatively small codebase wise, and very easy to understand. Let alone it's fast and runs as a binary, so I can eventually just compile the lib's and distribute them, rather than a huge array of php files.

Anyway, the first stage in the great conquest was to teach leds a little about PHP. So starting with Zend's lexer, I hand crafted a reasonably complete lexer in D, (it ignores variables in quoted strings, and heredocs), but should be enough to grab defined classes/methods/vars etc. and work out where to put the folding...

While at present, it's has a few in-efficiencies, as the design was a little organic. It is however quite an interesting way to build a generic language parser and only took 2 days to write and test.. http://www.akbkhome.com/svn/D_Stuff/leds/PhpParser.d