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Patching exuberant-ctags for better PHP5 support in vim
by Sander MarechalThanks to the taglist vim plugin, vim users have access to a decent tag browser. A tag browser allows you to view a list of all variables, functions and classes and quickly jump to their definitions. Taglist is built on exuberant ctags so it support a large amount of languages. Unfortunately however, when the exuberant ctags people replaced their old PHP lexer with a brand new regexp-based parser the quality of parsing PHP code decreased dramatically. Ctags suddenly could not distinguish real class and function declarations from mere mentions of the words “class” and “function” in multi-line comments. This is because the ctags regular expression parses is inherently line oriented.
In this article I have two patches that greatly improve PHP support in exuberant-ctags. I will also show you how you can apply these patches on a Debian-based system.
Update 2009-07-07: David Mudrak has written an updated patch for Gentoo. I have ported his improvements back to my patch here. It fixed a problem with old-style functions without a visibility declaration and it applied the same trick to interfaces as well.
