Add sniffs for new and removed PHP constants

[jrfnl]

See title ;-)

[MarkMaldaba]

What new and removed PHP constants? A list or link would be helpful!

[jrfnl]

PHP Changelog anyone ?

I haven't created the sniff yet, but have got an initial array with names and versions set up of over 200 new constants in PHP 5+.

For PHP 7.1: Ref: http://php.net/manual/en/migration71.constants.php

[MarkMaldaba]

Ah - I see. This is a completely new Sniff. I thought it was for 7.1 specifically.

btw How are you working these out - trawling the change logs, or via some form of automated process?

I wonder if we could write some code to automatically extract this kind of thing from the tagged source of each release?

[jrfnl]

I thought it was for 7.1 specifically.

Ah, no. The issues I opened for 7.1 are prefixed as such. This is a generic new one ;-)

btw How are you working these out - trawling the change logs, or via some form of automated process?

For now manually going through changelogs (as I was going through them anyway).

Automating would be interesting, but might be more time-consuming just to build it vs manually updating for the next ten years or so.

[MarkMaldaba]

Automating would be interesting, but might be more time-consuming just to build it vs manually updating for the next ten years or so.

Maybe... or maybe not.

The two ways I thought of are:

1. Looking at the source. For example, the func_info_t array in zend_func_info.c. If you have a list of release tags (trivial) - and assuming that code hasn't moved around too much - you should be able to extract a full list of functions/constants/keywords, etc. for each PHP version pretty easily (right back to however far we want to go, including PHP4).
2. Writing a little PHP script that uses built-in PHP features to list all functions/classes/etc. (e.g. using get_defined_functions() or Reflection) and then running it against all PHP releases. Probably most trivially done on Windows, which has pre-compiled binaries you can just unzip and throw code at.

It's something I've been thinking about but I don't have any time right now. I hope to look into it one day, but thought it worth mentioning in case it would save you work in the meantime.

(FWIW, I also wrote a script at one point that trawled the offline version of the PHP docs and extracted version information from that, though I don't know what happened to it (might see if I can dig it out...). That might be another approach. It might be interesting to compare the results these different tactics give, too - I wonder how correct the documentation/changelog actually is?)