phpwtf

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Search PHP's documentation from the command line.

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**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.

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