How to Remove Comments from PHP Code Automatically?

Automatically Removing Comments from PHP Code

For efficient code maintenance and readability, it's often necessary to remove comments from PHP files. This can be a tedious process, but there are effective solutions available to streamline the task.

Tokenizer-Based Solution

Utilizing PHP's tokenizer offers a comprehensive approach to removing comments while preserving embedded HTML. Here's a detailed implementation:

<code class="php">$fileStr = file_get_contents('path/to/file');
$newStr  = '';

$commentTokens = array(T_COMMENT);

if (defined('T_DOC_COMMENT')) {
    $commentTokens[] = T_DOC_COMMENT; // PHP 5
}

if (defined('T_ML_COMMENT')) {
    $commentTokens[] = T_ML_COMMENT;  // PHP 4
}

$tokens = token_get_all($fileStr);

foreach ($tokens as $token) {    
    if (is_array($token)) {
        if (in_array($token[0], $commentTokens)) {
            continue;
        }
        
        $token = $token[1];
    }

    $newStr .= $token;
}

echo $newStr;</code>

Benefits:

• Preserves line breaks
• Maintains embedded HTML
• Detailed handling of different comment types

This solution produces the desired output by removing all comments while preserving the original code structure and embedded HTML. It caters to both PHP 4 and PHP 5 environments. By iterating through the tokens and selectively skipping comment tokens, the solution efficiently extracts the relevant code snippets.

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