Edited 2008-12-28: This issue was fixed in php-mode 1.5.0.

One of the things which I’ve been frustrated with when coding PHP in Emacs is the uselessness of it’s defun-handling functions. Things like mark-defun, narrow-to-defun, beginning-of-defun just didn’t work for me. More precisely, they didn’t work when I was writing OOP code, though they worked for procedural code. Not helpful, since I’m a firm believer in object-oriented programming.

The core of the problem is php-beginning-of-defun-regexp, which doesn’t match many of the keywords available since PHP 5: public, protected, private, static, abstract, or final. I toyed with changing it to match all that, but the number of combinations made it somewhat convoluted. Instead, I went with the rather graceless (though easy) regexp you will find below. It simply ignores anything on the line preceding the function keyword.

(defconst php-beginning-of-defun-regexp
   "^.*function\\s +&?\\(\\(\\sw\\|\\s_\\)+\\)\\s *(")

With this, I’m happily using these functions while writing OOP PHP code.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 8th, 2008 at 3:29 pm and is filed under Code, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.