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:

$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;

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.