flsouto/textract

Extracts and combines multiline comments from php files

textract

Overview

This command line tool allows you to extract multiline comments from php source files producing a string with all matched comments. This will not extract doc blocks, only texts between /* and */., _(*1)

Installation

Either clone this repo or use composer:, _(*2)

composer require flsouto/textract

For convenience I recommend you create an alias to the "process" script:, _(*3)

alias textract='php /path/to/flsouto/textract/process.php'

Usage

Say we have created two scripts containing multiline comments:, _(*4)

source1.php:, _(*5)

<?php

/*
This line and
this other line
must be extracted
*/
function test(){
    return '';
}

/* 
This line should also be extracted
*/

source2.php:, _(*6)

<?php

/*
More text from source2
*/

Now, if we run textract from the command line:, _(*7)

textract source1.php source2.php

We get this output:, _(*8)

This line and
this other line
must be extracted

This line should also be extracted

More text from source2

Instead, we could write:, _(*9)

textract source1.php source2.php > output.md

And we would have the output saved to the output.md file., _(*10)

Final thoughts

I use this utility for producing documentations out of the source code itself because I think it speeds up the process a lot. Also, if you are interested in this kind of thing, you should take a look at this other utility I created which allows you to extract snippets from your source code, execute them, and paste both the snippet and output in your markdown documentation: markdown-x, _(*11)