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

Usage

use php_rs_parser::parse;

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

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

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

Performance

This parser is optimized for modern PHP applications with full typing (PHP 7.4+, 8.x). It delivers fastest performance on Symfony, Laravel, and other typed codebases.

The parser prioritizes performance on contemporary PHP patterns:

• Type hints — Full coverage (union types, mixed, never, readonly, attributes, etc.)
• Complex expressions — Method chains, array access, spread operators
• Arrays & collections — Configuration-heavy code (Symfony/Laravel patterns)
• Structured OOP — Classes, traits, interfaces with complete feature support

See PERFORMANCE_ANALYSIS.md and SYMFONY_OPTIMIZATION_ANALYSIS.md for detailed profiling and optimization analysis.

The fastest full-featured PHP parser. For comparative benchmarks against other PHP parsers (nikic/PHP-Parser, alternative implementations), see php-parser-benchmark.

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

BSD 3-Clause