PHP Lexical and Syntax analyzer written in C/C++

Question

I'm writing a PHP IDE in Qt4 for my Master's project. I am trying to duplicate a lot of the functionality of Eclipse or Visual Studio without all the bloat and the overhead. I'm trying to do some code completion but I need to do some syntax analyzing to have intelligent code completion. I've looked at the PHP source code and thought about just compiling the Zend engine in my code (and give credit where credit is due), but even after staring at the code for a couple of days I'm not sure where to start with that.

Does anyone know some C++ code that already accomplishes this, or have used the Zend engine for their own purposes, or have some advice about writing my own?

Answer 1

PHP does not have anything even remotely close to a formal LALR(1) or LL(k) grammar that you could use to implement this in a manner suitable for academia. Zend's parser is not context-aware and is full of ad-hoc disambiguations from what I've seen.

That is not to say you cannot write something that does simple syntax highlighting. Take for example this javascript implementation. The code for their tokenizer is here and an active thread about the project is here.