Tomas Votruba has a post to his site that (sort of) continues his look at the parsing of PHP code into an AST and the use of the nikic/php-parser library. In this new post however, he covers several of the things that can be changed in PHP code using the library.

Today we can do amazing things with PHP. Thanks to AST and nikic/php-parser we can create very narrow artificial intelligence, which can work for us.

Let's create first its synapse!

He starts with a clarification about the difference between "php-ast" (an extension) and "PHP AST" (the actual abstract syntax tree). It then gets into some of the functionality that the php-parser library provides for modifying the PHP code being parsed. This includes changing method names, renaming properties, splitting classes and even potentially upgrading an application to a newer version. As an example he shows how to change the name of a method and write the result out to a file (all code is included).