Question

I want to search withing PHP-Files for a special function call. The reason is, that I want to generate .MO-Files for the GetText-Extension. So I first need to create a .PO-Files, which contains all the needed text-strings.

I already find a lot of texts, but there are some problems.

Here is my Regex to find the first Argument of an functioncall:

/\_\([\'|\"]{1}(.+?[^\\\])[\'|\"]{1}[,]{0,1}.*?\)+/si

I need to find function-calls with the following patterns:

_("text");
_("text %s", 3);
_('text');

The Text could contain escaped Quotes. My Problem is acuallty, that I need to know, if there was an apostrophe or an normal quote used for the call.

If I have the call

_('"text"');

then i get the Problem, that I get the text

"text

without the ending quote.

Does anybody of you have an Idea, how I can get my Regex to work?

Answer 1

I would use PHP’s tokenizer for this kind of stuff, not regular expressions:

$funcName = '_';
$tokens   = token_get_all(file_get_contents('path/to/your/script.php'));
$strings  = array();

foreach($tokens as $index => $token){

  if(!is_array($token))
    continue;

  if($token[0] === T_CONSTANT_ENCAPSED_STRING){

    if(!isset($tokens[$index - 2]) || ($tokens[$index - 1] !== "("))
      continue;

    list($id, $text, $line) = $tokens[$index - 2];

    // this is your string (substr drops quotes around it)
    if(($id === T_STRING) && ($text === $funcName))
      $strings[] = substr($token[1], 1, -1);

  }    
}

var_dump($strings);