Rust PHP Parser

A fast, fault-tolerant PHP parser written in Rust. Produces a full AST with source spans, recovers from syntax errors, and covers the vast majority of PHP 8.x syntax.

Inspired by and tested against the nikic/PHP-Parser test suite.

Note: The parser targets PHP 8.5 by default — all supported syntax from PHP 5.x through 8.5 is accepted.

Architecture

Cargo workspace with three crates:

Crate	Purpose
php-lexer	Hand-written tokenizer with handling for strings, heredoc/nowdoc, and inline HTML
php-ast	AST type definitions, serializable via Serde
php-parser	Pratt-based recursive descent parser with panic-mode error recovery

Usage

use php_parser::parse;

let result = parse("<?php echo 'Hello, world!';");

println!("{:#?}", result.program);

for err in &result.errors {
    println!("error at {:?}: {}", err.span(), err);
}

Testing

cargo test --test integration               # hand-written integration tests
cargo test --test nikic_integration_tests   # nikic/PHP-Parser fixture tests

Fixture files live in crates/php-parser/tests/fixtures/.

Roadmap

See ROADMAP.md.

License