How are PHPDoc comments analyzed in PHP?

Question

In frameworks like Zend Framework (or extensions of it), it is sometimes possible to pass information like type hints to the framework code by using PHPDoc style comments.

I cannot imagine that the framework parses the files using PHP, but I do not see any other way to achieve this, except for some built-in language feature of PHP, which I don't know of. So how is this done?

Answer 1

They use reflection and especially ReflectionMethod::getDocComment() (there is also ReflectionClass::getDocComment(), ReflectionProperty::getDocComment() and ReflectionFunction::getDocComment()). The rest is simple: just parse the doc-block with some regular expressions or something like that.