Prendre un Café

Just found this nice project contributed by the Facebook team, phpsh. Basically, it’s an interactive and advanced command line interface to php, a kind of super-php -r similar to what you can find in Python or Ruby. Ironically enough, phpsh is mostly written in Python, by the way.

To install phpsh, just get it from github^[1]:

$ git clone git://github.com/facebook/phpsh.git
$ cd phpsh
$ python setup.py build
$ sudo python setup.py install

To run phpsh:

$ phpsh
Starting php
type 'h' or 'help' to see instructions & features
php> ="hello world"
hello world
php> =2 + 2
4
php> $a = 8

php> =$a
8

Note that you don’t have to open or close <?php tags, you can print something just by prepending an = sign to the command, and no need to type semicolum at the end of a call. Easy^[2].

You can access a function documentation by just prepending the d keyword to its name:

php> d strlen
 
# strlen
 
(PHP 4, PHP 5)
 
strlen -- Get string length
 
### Description
 
int strlen ( string $string )
 
Returns the length of the given string . 
 
### Parameters
 
string     
 
The [string][1] being measured for length. 
 
### Return Values
 
The length of the string on success, and 0 if the string is empty. 
 
### 
 
   [1]: #language.types.string

You can define your own classes and functions, and run them:

php> function foo($a){echo $a.'!';}
php> foo('bar')
bar!

Same goes for classes:

php> class Foo {public function bar($a){echo $a.'!';}}
php> $f = new Foo()
php> $f->bar('baz')
baz!

You can even execute shell command from there:

php> ! ls -la

Of course, you can import include and require files. As a concrete example, let’s roughly play with the symfony API:

php> ! symfony -V
symfony version 1.2.2-DEV (/Users/niko/Sites/vendor/symfony12/lib)
php> c /Users/niko/Sites/vendor/symfony12/lib/autoload/sfCoreAutoload.class.php
Extra includes are: ['/Users/niko/Sites/vendor/symfony12/lib/autoload/sfCoreAutoload.class.php']
php> sfCoreAutoload::register()
php> =sfYaml::load('foo: bar')
array(
  "foo" => "bar",
)
php> =sfYaml::dump(array('foo' => array('bar' => 'baz')))
"foo:\n  bar: baz\n"

Last but not least, when enough playing, type q or press ctrl + d to quit phpsh.