Advanced Usage

Advanced Usage -- Advanced usage information

Specifying Valid File Extensions

By default, PHP_CodeSniffer will check any file it finds with a .inc or .php extension. Sometimes, this means that PHP_CodeSniffer is not checking enough of your files. Sometimes, the opposite is true. PHP_CodeSniffer allows you to specify a list of valid file extensions using the --extensions command line argument. Extensions are separated by commas.

Anmerkung: If you have asked PHP_CodeSniffer to check a specific file rather than an entire directory, the extension of the specified file will be ignored. The file will be checked even if it has an invalid extension or no extension at all.

In the following example, the main.inc file will be checked by PHP_CodeSniffer even though the --extensions command line argument specifies that only .php files should be checked.

Anmerkung: The ignoring of file extensions for specific files is a feature of PHP_CodeSniffer and is the only way to check files without an extension. If you check an entire directory of files, all files without extensions will be ignored, so you must check each of these file separately.

Printing Verbose Tokeniser Output

Anmerkung: This feature is provided for debugging purposes only. Using this feature will dramatically increase screen output and script running time.

PHP_CodeSniffer contains multiple verbosity levels. Level 2 (indicated by the command line argument -vv) will print all verbosity information for level 1 (file specific token and line counts with running times) as well as verbose tokeniser output.

The output of the PHP_CodeSniffer tokeniser shows the step-by-step creation of the scope map and the level map.

The Scope Map

The scope map is best explained with an example. For the following file:

<?php
if ($condition) {
    echo 'Condition was true';
}
?>

The scope map output is:

The scope map output above shows the following pieces of information about the file:

The scope map output is most useful when debugging PHP_CodeSniffer's scope map, which is critically important to the successful checking of a file, but is also useful for checking the type of a particular token. For example, if you are unsure of the token type for an opening curly brace, the scope map output shows you that the type is T_OPEN_CURLY_BRACKET and not, for example, T_OPEN_CURLY_BRACE.

The Level Map

The level map is best explained with an example. For the following file:

<?php
if ($condition) {
    echo 'Condition was true';
}
?>

The level map output is:

The level map output above shows the following pieces of information about the file:

The level map is most commonly used to determine indentation rules (eg. a token 4 levels deep requires 16 spaces of indentation) or to determine if a particular token is within a particular scope (eg. a function keyword is within a class scope, making it a method).

Printing Verbose Token Processing Output

Anmerkung: This feature is provided for debugging purposes only. Using this feature will dramatically increase screen output and script running time.

PHP_CodeSniffer contains multiple verbosity levels. Level 3 (indicated by the command line argument -vvv) will print all verbosity information for level 1 (file specific token and line counts with running times), level 2 (tokeniser output) as well as token processing output with sniff running times.

The token processing output is best explained with an example. For the following file:

<?php
if ($condition) {
    echo 'Condition was true';
}
?>

The token processing output is:

Every token processed is shown, along with its ID, type and contents. For each token, all sniffs that were executed on the token are displayed, along with the running time.

For example, the output above shows us that token 1, an if keyword, had 3 sniffs executed on it; the ControlSignature sniff, the ScopeClosingBrace sniff and the ScopeIndent sniff. Each was executed fairly quickly, but the slowest was the ScopeClosingBrace sniff, taking 0.0248 seconds to process that token.

The other interesting piece of information we get from the output above is that only 2 tokens in the whole file had sniffs executed on them; tokens 0 and 1. This is normal behavior for PHP_CodeSniffer as most sniffs listen for a very specific and rarely used token and then execute on it and a number of tokens following it.

For example, the ScopeIndentSniff executes on the if statement's token only, but actually checks the indentation of every line within the if statement. The sniff uses the scope map to find all tokens within the if statement.