POPSuL / BetterReflection

:crystal_ball: Better Reflection is a reflection API that aims to improve and provide more features than PHP's built-in reflection API.

Better Reflection

Better Reflection is a reflection API that aims to improve and provide more features than PHP's built-in reflection API.

Why is it better?

• You can reflect on classes that are not already loaded, without loading them
• Ability to reflect on classes directly from a string of PHP code
• Better Reflection analyses the DocBlocks (using phpdocumentor/type-resolver)
• Reflecting directly on closures
• Ability to extract AST from methods and functions
• Ability to return AST representation of a class or function
• Fetch return type declaration and parameter type declarations in PHP 7 code (even when running PHP 5!)
• Change or remove PHP 7 parameter type and return type declarations from methods and functions
• Change the body of a function or method to do something different
• Moar stuff coming soon!

Be sure to read more in the feature documentation.

Installation

Simply require using composer:

$ composer require roave/better-reflection

Usage

use Roave\BetterReflection\Reflection\ReflectionClass;

$classInfo = ReflectionClass::createFromName('Foo\Bar\MyClass');

Changes in BR 2.0

• Changed instantiation of FindReflectionOnLine utility from new FindReflectionOnLine() to FindReflectionOnLine::buildDefaultFinder(). FindReflectionOnLine constructor now requires a SourceLocator parameter.
• Minimum PHP 7.1
• NotAString exception class is now gone
• Identifier class requires string for $name parameter
• CompilerContext requires second parameter (no longer optional, but still nullable)
• Reflector now requires a string for $identiferName parameter
• Namespace moved to \Roave\BetterReflection instead of just \BetterReflection

More documentation

• Compatibility with core Reflection API
• Basic usage instructions
• Using types
• The features
• Test suite
• AST extraction
• Reflection modification

Limitations

• PHP cannot autoload functions, therefore we cannot statically reflect functions
• Using ReflectionClass::createFromName() makes some assumptions. Alternative reflection techniques are possible to overcome this.

Authors

• James Titcumb
• Marco Pivetta
• Gary Hockin

License

This package is released under the MIT license.

Contributing

If you wish to contribute to the project, please read the CONTRIBUTING notes.