phpwtf

phpwtf is a command line tool for quickly displaying PHP function signatures in order to eliminate the need to browse PHP's documentation website.

Usage

Pretend I forget if the function to get a file's contents is file_get_contents or get_file_contents. I can enter the terms as separate arguments and be reminded which one is correct:

$ phpwtf get file contents
string     file_get_contents (string $filename [, bool $use_include_path = false [, resource $context [, int $offset = -1 [, int $maxlen ]]]])

Similarly, I often forget how to do an md5 in PHP. Is it md5sum or md5? I can do a substring match and get all the md5 related functions:

$ phpwtf md5
string     md5 (string $str [, bool $raw_output = false ])
string     md5_file (string $filename [, bool $raw_output = false ])

Also, as you can see, the order of arguments is presented. So if you are like me and forget how to invoke in_array or strpos you can quickly look that up:

$ phpwtf in_array
bool       in_array (mixed $needle, array $haystack [, bool $strict = FALSE ])

Best of all, the database of signatures is cached.

That means that the script looks at a local file to generate the output. You don't have to worry about spotty or slow network connections in order to get the documentation for a function. Here's an example of how fast it is:

$ time phpwtf array map
array      array_map (callable $callback, array $arr1 [, array $... ])
0.012u 0.020s 0:00.03 100.0%    0+0k 0+0io 0pf+0w

Installation

There's a simple shell script, install.sh which puts phpwtf into your $HOME/bin directory and then stores the cache as $HOME/.phpwtf-cache. As of this writing, it's 5 lines total so don't be frightened to inspect it.

$ ./install.sh

A copy of a recently generated database is included in this git repo so you don't need to create a new one. But if you want to, continue reading.

Troubleshooting

You should probably have $HOME/bin at the end of your PATH. If you don't know how to do this and the install.sh doesn't seem to work, you probably are using the default shell, bash, and can do this:

$ echo 'export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin' >> ~/.bashrc

Now open a new terminal and you should be ready to go.

How does phpwtf work?

Inside the tools directory you'll find a build-local-cache file. It does the following:

1. Download the latest single-file php manual from a US php mirror
2. Trims the file to something that is easier to parse
3. Intereprets each function's html one at a time as a single signature "stanza", generated from #2
4. Adds that to a PHP object.
5. Serialize that to disk.
6. Store as "reference.bz2" in the parent directory.

Note: A database is already provided in this repository so you don't have to run this script if you want to start quickly.

install.sh bunzip2s this serialized object and places it in your home directory. Then the tool phpwtf (stored in $HOME/bin) queries the object to find matches and displays it at your terminal.