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What’s the best way to remove comments from a PHP file?
I want to do something similar to strip-whitespace() - but it shouldn't remove the line breaks as well.
For example,
I want this:
<?PHP // something if ($whatsit) { do_something(); # we do something here echo '<html>Some embedded HTML</html>'; } /* another long comment */ some_more_code(); ?> to become:
<?PHP if ($whatsit) { do_something(); echo '<html>Some embedded HTML</html>'; } some_more_code(); ?> (Although if the empty lines remain where comments are removed, that wouldn't be OK.)
It may not be possible, because of the requirement to preserve embedded HTML - that’s what’s tripped up the things that have come up on Google.
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Answer: Use the Syntax "// text" and "/* text */" Comments are usually written within the block of PHP code to explain the functionality of the code.
So because PHP tags are not valid in HTML files, when not preprocessed by the server, the browser doesn't recognise it, so it automatically converts it to comments since it doesn't know what else to do with it.
I'd use tokenizer. Here's my solution. It should work on both PHP 4 and 5:
$fileStr = file_get_contents('path/to/file'); $newStr = ''; $commentTokens = array(T_COMMENT); if (defined('T_DOC_COMMENT')) { $commentTokens[] = T_DOC_COMMENT; // PHP 5 } if (defined('T_ML_COMMENT')) { $commentTokens[] = T_ML_COMMENT; // PHP 4 } $tokens = token_get_all($fileStr); foreach ($tokens as $token) { if (is_array($token)) { if (in_array($token[0], $commentTokens)) { continue; } $token = $token[1]; } $newStr .= $token; } echo $newStr; Use php -w <sourcefile> to generate a file stripped of comments and whitespace, and then use a beautifier like PHP_Beautifier to reformat for readability.
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