One-line heredoc for better syntax highlightning

Hi internals!

Some editors can guess the domain-specific language inside heredoc, e.g. if you do

$query = <<<MySQL
SELECT * FROM foo
MySQL;

It would be nice if this feature could be used in single lines as well:

$query = <<<MySQL SELECT * FROM foo MySQL;

While I can't immediately think of a practical problem with this, I'm hesitant at the idea of adding yet more ways of quoting strings; it means more for users to learn, more for third party parsers to implement (including exactly the syntax highlighting tools you're going to help), and in the worst case, more edge cases that can lead to security issues.

I don't know about other editors, but PhpStorm at least also recognises an in-line comment explicitly labelling any string, which if anything seems more explicit:

$query = /** @lang mysql */"SELECT * FROM foo";

Regards,

--
Rowan Tommins
[IMSoP]

8 months ago by Sara Golemon — view source

unread

On 19 September 2022 15:24:26 BST, "Olle Härstedt" <
olle.haerstedt@limesurvey.org> wrote:

Some editors can guess the domain-specific language inside heredoc, e.g.
if you do

$query = <<<MySQL
SELECT * FROM foo
MySQL;

It would be nice if this feature could be used in single lines as well:

$query = <<<MySQL SELECT * FROM foo MySQL;

Good news! This feature exists and was introduced by Rasmus checks
notes about 25 years ago.

To use it, you'll want to hold down your shift key, then press the key just
to the left of your enter key. This is called a "quote", and you can see
it demonstrated here around the word quote.

Hope that helps!

Seriously though, I know you're looking to help your editor find something
to syntax highlight, but this is an editor problem, not a PHP language
problem. If your editor can detect SQL in heredoc, then it should be able
to improve and find it in interpolated strings. Making the parser more
complex for no benefit to the actual language (some detriment, I would
argue) is not the fix here.

-Sara

P.S. - Yes, I'm assuming a US layout, you know where your quote key is.

8 months ago by olleharstedt@gmail.com — view source

unread

2022-09-20 17:00 GMT+02:00, Sara Golemon pollita@php.net:

On 19 September 2022 15:24:26 BST, "Olle Härstedt" <
olle.haerstedt@limesurvey.org> wrote:

Some editors can guess the domain-specific language inside heredoc, e.g.
if you do

$query = <<<MySQL
SELECT * FROM foo
MySQL;

It would be nice if this feature could be used in single lines as well:

$query = <<<MySQL SELECT * FROM foo MySQL;

Good news! This feature exists and was introduced by Rasmus checks
notes about 25 years ago.

To use it, you'll want to hold down your shift key, then press the key just
to the left of your enter key. This is called a "quote", and you can see
it demonstrated here around the word quote.

Hope that helps!

Seriously though, I know you're looking to help your editor find something
to syntax highlight, but this is an editor problem, not a PHP language
problem. If your editor can detect SQL in heredoc, then it should be able
to improve and find it in interpolated strings.

Nope, because you need to be explicit which type of SQL you're working
with - MySQL, Postgres, SQL Server, etc. Would be hard to write a
regexp to guess that for the editor. :) In the Vim case, it reads your
delimiter name and applies syntax highlight from that (mysql,
javascript, html).

Making the parser more
complex for no benefit to the actual language (some detriment, I would
argue) is not the fix here.

-Sara

P.S. - Yes, I'm assuming a US layout, you know where your quote key is.

I you read my text more carefully, you'd see that I thought the parser
would be simplified by my suggestion, by removing what I thought was
an arbitrary limitation. I was wrong. :(

Olle

8 months ago by tim@bastelstu.be — view source

unread

$query = <<<MySQL
SELECT * FROM foo
MySQL;

It would be nice if this feature could be used in single lines as well:

$query = <<<MySQL SELECT * FROM foo MySQL;

I don't find that example particularly readable or convincing. It mushes
together PHP and MySQL keywords too much.

Once you add a WHERE clause that SQL query should be split across
multiple multiple lines for readability anyway and even for that very
simple example I personally would add a linebreak in front of the FROM:

$query = <<<MySQL
SELECT *
FROM foo
MySQL;

Best regards
Tim Düsterhus