How to parse function name with arguments in PHP? - php

Question

I am building a module for my own PHP framework, so my question is very specific and special. It's difficult to explain my question so I will go ahead and show it on code below.
I have a little piece of PHP in a $code variable, it looks like this:
$code = "___echo(TODAY_IS, date('j.n.Y', time()), time());";
What I need is to parse this $code variable and I want to get this result:
$result = array(
'function_name' => "___echo",
'arguments' => array(
0 => "TODAY_IS",
1 => "date('j.n.Y', time())",
2 => "time()"
)
);
I am thinking and I have tried using some regex, but neither worked sufficiently well. I also tried using Tokenizer, however I wasn't successful either.
Thanks for any hints or help in advance.

Answer 1

Here is a shot using PHP-Parser. It's likely going to be more useful than tokenizer or some freaky regex.
Example:
$code = "___echo(TODAY_IS, date('j.n.Y', time()), time());";
$parser = new PhpParser\Parser(new PhpParser\Lexer);
$prettyPrinter = new PhpParser\PrettyPrinter\Standard;
$statements = $parser->parse("<?php $code");
$result['function_name'] = $statements[0]->name->toString();
foreach ($statements[0]->args as $arg) {
$result['arguments'][] = $prettyPrinter->prettyPrint(array($arg));
}
var_export($result);
Output:
array (
'function_name' => '___echo',
'arguments' =>
array (
0 => 'TODAY_IS',
1 => 'date(\'j.n.Y\', time())',
2 => 'time()',
),
)

Answer 2

token_get_all() function is what you need here:
token_get_all("<?php ___echo(TODAY_IS, date('j.n.Y', time()), time());")
This returns a list of tokens parsed from the given string. See the tokens documentation for recognizing the items of the list.
In my opinion, tokenizer-based solution should be preferred over any regular expressions based on whatever is written in the PHP manual regarding syntax.