Better Reflection

Better Reflection is a reflection API that aims to improve and provide more features than PHP's built-in reflection API.

[!TIP] Are you reflecting on how to improve your application? We offer consulting on this library, as well as plenty of other development work. If you need any help, feel free to get in touch.

- The Roave Team

Why is it better?

• You can reflect on classes that are not already loaded, without loading them
• Ability to reflect on classes directly from a string of PHP code
• Reflecting directly on closures
• Ability to extract AST from methods and functions
• Ability to return AST representation of a class or function
• Fetch return type declaration and parameter type declarations in PHP 7 code
• Moar stuff coming soon!

Typically you would use Better Reflection for static analysis tooling. It can serve as a baseline to access type information (e.g. doc blocks, type declarations), method/function body AST fetching etc. for static analysis.

Better Reflection is NOT suited to runtime usage, since performance is much worse than PHP built-in reflection. If you do not want to do anything that native PHP reflection can't do, then just use native PHP reflection! The "Better" in Better Reflection refers to feature, not speed!

Be sure to read more in the feature documentation.

Installation

Require using composer:

composer require roave/better-reflection

Usage

<?php

use Roave\BetterReflection\BetterReflection;

$classInfo = (new BetterReflection())
    ->reflector()
    ->reflectClass(\Foo\Bar\MyClass::class);

Documentation

• Compatibility with core Reflection API
• Basic usage instructions
• Using types
• The features
• Test suite

Upgrading

Please refer to the Upgrade Documentation documentation to see what is required to upgrade your installed BetterReflection version.

Limitations

• PHP cannot autoload functions, therefore we cannot statically reflect functions

License

This package is released under the MIT license.

Contributing

If you wish to contribute to the project, please read the CONTRIBUTING notes.