I am writing a regular expression for parsing PHP annotations in a flexible way.
I'd like to accomplish all the goals listed above with one single expression. So I would appreciate any suggestions about the quality of it (in terms of corner cases, performance, best practices and correctness).
**PCRE expression:**
/[\*\s]*@(?P<name>\w+[\\\w]*?)(?:\s|\()
(?P<value>
(?:[\/\w\s\"\<\>\_\#\=\-\.\'\{\}:;,\*\(\)\[\]]*[^\R\*\s\/\)])
)?
(?:\s | $|\))/gsxmu
**Goals of the regular expression:**
- List all annotations with their values
- Values can be multi-lined and have markup (html, json or markdown)
- The initial space + * of each line should be removed from the value
- Many annotations can be in the same line
- Annotation names can be namespaced
**Sample PHPDoc string:**
> /**
> * Description
> *
> * @Tag name name @annotation beee @aaf dsfsd fgdg
> * @Tag name name {"json":"dfsf"}
> * @Tag asdasd <html> #markdown ==markdown== __markdown__
> * - markdown
> * > mark 1
> .mark
> "string"
> 'string'
> * @Annotation()
> * @Tag name name @annotation beee @aaf dsfsd fgdg <markdown> #markdown ==markdown==
> * @a() @b("name") @c()
> * @Annotation\Name("var1()", "var2") @n("name()_name")
> * @Annotation(["var1", "var2"], "var3")
> * @Annotation\Filter\Name(["var1", "var2"], "var3", {"var4": "var5"})
> * @Annotation(
> * ["GET", "POST"]
> ) @Name({"name": "Tomas"})
> * @Tag name name
> */
Expected result:
> <?php
>
> array(
> [
> 'name' => 'Tag',
> 'value' => 'name name'
> ],
> [
> 'name' => 'annotation',
> 'value' => 'bee'
> ],
> [
> 'name' => 'aaf',
> 'value' => 'dsfsd fgdg'
> ]
> // ... and so on... (see live example)
> );
A live demo can be found [here](https://regex101.com/r/zU1eQ5/7).