ReflectionDocBlock

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.

Installation

composer require 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:

// Contains the summary for this DocBlock$summary = $docblock->getSummary();
// Contains \phpDocumentor\Reflection\DocBlock\Description object$description = $docblock->getDescription();
// You can either cast it to string$description = (string) $docblock->getDescription();
// Or use the render method to get a string representation of the Description.$description = $docblock->getDescription()->render();

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