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classes that specify visibility on class constants can't be parsed

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#224 2 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
45/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
php
Domain
documentation, tooling

Research direction

Inspect the Composer dependencies involving nikic/php-parser and phpdocumentor/reflection, then reproduce the failure with the class-constant example in the issue. Verify that the dependency update parses public and protected class constants and that the existing parser behavior remains intact.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

For example,

class My_Class {
    public const C1    = 'value';
    protected const C2 = 'another value';
    ...
}

Trying the parse the above results in an error like:

Parse Error: Syntax error, unexpected T_CONST, expecting T_FUNCTION on line xyz

and the entire class is not imported.

Visibility for class constants wasn't added to PHP until 7.1. Of course, as of today (2020-08-14) nothing in core specifies visibility on class constants since the minimum PHP is still 5.6. And current WPCS states:

Visibility for class constants can not be used in WordPress Core until the minimum PHP version has been raised to PHP 7.1 (and won’t be enforced until that time).

It is hopeful (likely?) that WP 5.6 will bump the minimum PHP to 7.1. So, the need to parse such classes will be coming sooner rather than later.

As best I can tell, the error is generated by nikic/php-parser, which is a transitive dependency of phpdocumentor/reflection. The latest version of nikic/php-parser fully supports PHP 7.1+, so I think the solution is simply to update the composer dependencies of this plugin, but things will need to be tested thoroughly after those dependencies are updated.

Dominant language
PHP
Stars
239
Forks
81
Avg merge
16h 29m
Merged PRs (30d)
8

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