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Compatibility updates required

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#246 9 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Quiet
Tech stack
php

Research direction

Start by reviewing the existing upgrade attempt and reproducing the parser failures on PHP 7.4 and 8.1, comparing behavior with and without the src/ base path. Inspect vendor/phpdocumentor/reflection/src/phpDocumentor/Reflection/BaseReflector.php and the parser's tests/ handling. Done means the parser works with the supported PHP 8.1-era dependency and no longer reports the described syntax or object-conversion errors.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

This package / library / plugin is severely outdated, and no longer operates correctly on PHP 8.1.
I believe this library needs a fundamental rewrite.

Unfortunately the main dependency of it, "phpdocumentor/reflection" : "~3.0", (PHP 5.3.3+) has made several rewrites of the library in v4, v5, and v6. https://github.com/phpDocumentor/Reflection/releases
Additionally, v5.2 supported PHP >=7.2 (PHP8 support unknown), but v5.3 requires PHP 7.4/8.x, and v6 is PHP 8.1+ only.

I have previously gone done this path, and there's some changes here, but I have no recollection of the status or whether it worked / etc. https://github.com/WordPress/phpdoc-parser/compare/master...dd32:phpdoc-parser:try/upgrade-phpdocumentor

If you incorrectly run the parser on the develop.svn checkout without specifying the src/ folder as the base to parse, it'll run into this error on PHP 7.4 + WP 6.5+, which I'm assuming is newer PHP syntax that the parser doesn't understand in the tests/ folder.

[28-Apr-2025 03:14:29 UTC] PHP Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Object of class PhpParser\Node\Stmt\Class_ could not be converted to string in /var/www/html/wp-content/plugins/phpdoc-parser/vendor/phpdocumentor/reflection/src/phpDocumentor/Reflection/BaseReflector.php:172

But even without tests/ included, parsing will often throw errors like Parse Error: Syntax error, unexpected '?', expecting T_VARIABLE on line 62 Parse Error: Syntax error, unexpected '?', expecting T_VARIABLE on line 127 and I have no idea what impact that is having :)

ref https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/7963 https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/7964

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

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