Better Reflection is a reflection API that aims to improve and provide more features than PHP's built-in reflection API.

• You can reflect on classes that are not already loaded, without loading them
• Ability to reflect on classes directly from a string of PHP code
• Better Reflection analyses the DocBlocks (using phpdocumentor/type-resolver)
• Reflecting directly on closures
• Ability to extract AST from methods and functions
• Ability to return AST representation of a class or function
• Moar stuff coming soon!

Be sure to read more in the feature documentation.

Simply require using composer:

$ composer require roave/better-reflection

Please note that the current version has unstable dependencies.

In order to install those dependencies, you can set "minimum-stability" in your composer.json, and recommend that you set "prefer-stable":

{
    "minimum-stability": "dev",
    "prefer-stable": true
}

use BetterReflection\Reflector\ReflectionClass;

$classInfo = ReflectionClass::createFromName('Foo\Bar\MyClass');

• Compatibility with core Reflection API
• Basic usage instructions
• Using types
• The features
• Test suite
• AST extraction

• PHP cannot autoload functions, therefore we cannot statically reflect functions
• Using ReflectionClass::createFromName() makes some assumptions. Alternative reflection techniques are possible to overcome this.

• James Titcumb
• Marco Pivetta
• Gary Hockin

This package is released under the MIT license.

If you wish to contribute to the project, please read the CONTRIBUTING notes.