The ReflectionDocBlock Component

Introduction

The ReflectionDocBlock component of phpDocumentor provides a DocBlock parser that is 100% compatible with the PHPDoc standard.

With this component, a library can provide support for annotations via DocBlocks or otherwise retrieve information that is embedded in a DocBlock.

Note: this is a core component of phpDocumentor and is constantly being optimized for performance.

Installation

You can install the component in the following ways:

• Use the official Github repository (https://github.com/phpDocumentor/ReflectionDocBlock)
• Via Composer (http://packagist.org/packages/phpdocumentor/reflection-docblock)

Usage

In order to parse the DocBlock one needs a DocBlockFactory that can be instantiated using its createInstance factory method like this:

$factory  = \phpDocumentor\Reflection\DocBlockFactory::createInstance();

Then we can use the create method of the factory to interpret the DocBlock. Please note that it is also possible to provide a class that has the getDocComment() method, such as an object of type ReflectionClass, the create method will read that if it exists.

$docComment = <<<DOCCOMMENT
/**
 * This is an example of a summary.
 *
 * This is a Description. A Summary and Description are separated by either
 * two subsequent newlines (thus a whiteline in between as can be seen in this
 * example), or when the Summary ends with a dot (`.`) and some form of
 * whitespace.
 */
DOCCOMMENT;

$docblock = $factory->create($docComment);

The create method will yield an object of type \phpDocumentor\Reflection\DocBlock whose methods can be queried as shown in the following example.

// Should contain the summary for this DocBlock
$summary = $docblock->getSummary();

// Contains an object of type \phpDocumentor\Reflection\DocBlock\Description; 
// you can either cast it to string or use the render method to get a string 
// representation of the Description.
$description = $docblock->getDescription();

For more examples it would be best to review the scripts in the /examples folder.