PHPLINT

PHPLINT Friday, 12 January 07

Phplint is a simple Tcl program that checks PHP programs trying to find accesses to not initialized varibles. This errors are frequent in PHP due to typos. For example consider the following code:

    $fooBar = 10;
    echo($fooBaar);
               ^
               |___ error!

The wrong variable $fooBaar will only be found by the programmer when the program is executed and the exact line where the typo is preset is reached (assuming E_NOTICE error level is set).

Thanks to automatic tests this kind of errors should be avoided from the start, but the real world is not perfect so a tool trying to spot this errors can be useful.

Please Keep in mind that phplint is very limited and is not a real PHP parser, but just a number of regexp with some logic inside. This program was written at my company in some hour for the real world usage for a program we wanted to check after two weeks of refactoring, and it was able to found many bugs, so even if limited we hope it'll be useful for you too.

USAGE

Just try:

    tclsh phplint.tcl /my/php/program/dir/*.php

EXAMPLE

./phplint.tcl simpletest.php
* In simpletest.php line 5: access to uninitialized var 'kk'
* In simpletest.php line 6: access to uninitialized var 'newwar'

simpletest.php is the following program:

     1  <?
     2  function foo($a,$b) {
     3      $myArray = Array("foo" => 1, "bar" => 2);
     4      foreach($myArray as $v => $k) {
     5          $newvar = $v.$kk;
     6          echo($newwar);
     7      }
     8  }
     9  ?>

CODE ANNOTATIONS

In order to avoid that avoid that phplint false positives are reported it is possible to annotate the source code with the following annotations:

    $x = 10; # nolint

Phplint will not analyze this above line.

    function foobar() {
        .. analyzed code ..
        # lintoff
        .. not analyzed code ..
        # linton
        .. analyzed code ..
    }

The above example allows to skip a number of lines at once

NEWS

Pavel Hloušek contributed a much improved version of PHPLint! 0.2, this is the changelog:

exceptions, e.g. catch ( Exception $e )
text after function-closing }, e.g. } // some comment
types in argument list, e.g. function foo(MyBarClass $c)
default array value in argument list, e.g. function foo($a=array(), $b="bar")
superglobals, PHPLint ignores $GLOBALS, $_POST, $_GET, $_SESSION, $_SERVER, $_FILES superglobal variables now
one-line comments that start with //
array key checks, e.g. in $a[$b] = $c unassigned $b was not discovered in 0.1 version

DOWNLOAD

phplint is free software under the GPL2 license

FEEDBACKS

Email: antirez at gmail dot com

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