Command-line script to convert PHP's array() syntax to PHP 5.4's short array syntax [] using PHP's built-in tokenizer.
By relying on the PHP tokenizer, nothing but the array syntax itself will be altered. The script was successfully tested against code bases with more than 5.000 PHP files.
Usage: php convert.php [-w] <file>
Run the script with the path of the PHP file you wish to convert as argument. This will print the converted source code to STDOUT.
You can add the -w switch if you want to override the original file with the converted code.
In case of any error, an error message is written to STDERR and the script exits with a return code of 1.
Use find to convert a whole directory recursively:
find <directory> -name "*.php" -exec php "convert.php" -w "{}" \;
In case you don't trust the script yet, you can even perform a syntax check after conversion:
find <directory> -name "*.php" -exec php -l "{}" \; | grep "error:"