Question

This is something for regexp lovers 🙂

FLOW3’s Code Convention claim that you should annotate methods that do not return anything with @return void:

/**
 * A method
 *
 * @return void
 */

I keep forgetting it and want to regexp with netbeans for all methods that I’ve missed …

So far i got

\*\s[^@return]+.*(\n)\s.\*/ 

Which does not work really well:

/**
 * Method that gets matched.
 *
 * @param string $comment
 */
public function aMethod() {
    // Some Code
}

/**
 * A method that does not get matched and shouldn't.
 *
 * @param string $test
 * @return void
 */
public function anotherMethod($test) {
    // Some Code
}


/**
 * A variable that get's matched but should not
     * be matched.
 *
 * @var string
 */
protected $var;

/**
 * Why is this method getting matched?
 *
 * @return void
 */
private function thirdMethod() {
        // Code
    }

How would you match this?

Here’s an example in a regexp tester:

Answer 1

A negative lookbehind assertion might help:

\*\s*@[a-z]+(?<!return)\s+.+\s*\*/\s*(?:public|protected|private)?\s+function

This will match any function which does not have @return as the last line of the docblock. It might have some false positives, i.e. where a @return is there but not on the last line, but it’s a good start.

Note that this doesn’t work in Regex tester because JavaScript doesn’t support the lookbehind assertion. Here’s an example.