PHP 3.0 SGML HOWTO
Stig Bakken, ssb@guardian.no
$Date: 1998/01/05 10:47:27 $ $Revision: 1.10 $
Contents
1. Tools
1.1. SGML Editor
1.2. Conversion tools
2. Writing SGML documents
2.1. LINUXDOC reference
2.2. PHPDOC startup example
2.3. PHPDOC reference
2.3.1. Document structure
2.3.2. PHPDOC elements
2.3.3 Variable types
3. Connecting stuff
3.1. New PHPDOC files
3.2. Label name conventions
4. Converting from SGML
4.1. HTML
4.2. Plain text
4.3. Other formats...
For now this document describes how to find the tools you need on
UNIX. Since I am not a Windows user myself, information about SGML on
Windows will show up as soon as it has been gathered. This means that
Windows users have to give some feedback.
1. Tools
1.1. SGML Editor
Although it is possible to use a simple text editor such as vi or
notepad to write the SGML, it is recommended to use an SGML editor
that helps you along and makes sure your document is proper SGML
conforming to the used document type definition (DTD).
A pretty good and free SGML editor is Emacs or XEmacs with PSGML.
XEmacs is a fancier Emacs with better X support and a pile of Emacs
Lisp packages included. Emacs is ported to Windows 95/NT.
URLs:
If you do not use XEmacs you probably have to add this to your
~/.emacs file to make sure Emacs finds the installed files:
(add-to-list 'load-path
(expand-file-name "PREFIX/share/emacs/site-lisp/psgml"))
Replace PREFIX with the prefix you used when installing psgml
(the default is /usr/local).
Anyway you'll need this in your ~/.emacs to load psgml at
startup and make sure psgml is used for all files with .sgml
file ending:
(autoload 'sgml-mode "psgml" "Major mode for editing SGML files." t)
The existing .phpdoc files have "<!-- -*- SGML -*-
-->" in their header. When Emacs sees a pattern like "-*-
foo -*-" in the first line of a file, it tries to go into
foo-mode. So to activate psgml for .phpdoc files you
can include the above SGML comment in the first lines of the files you
write. Or, you can tell Emacs it should always open .phpdoc
files in sgml-mode by putting this in ~/.emacs:
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.phpdoc$" . sgml-mode))
For Windows users without NTFS, the .emacs file is called
_emacs, and resides in the directory given by the HOME
environment variable or C:/.
If you have information about other SGML editors, please send it.
1.2. Conversion tools
SGML-Tools (previously known as "Linuxdoc-SGML") contains almost all
the things you is needed to verify and convert PHP's SGML
documentation (you need Perl, too). Use version 1.0.2 of
SGML-Tools.
URLs:
2. Writing SGML documents
2.1. LINUXDOC reference
2.2. PHPDOC startup example
2.3. PHPDOC reference
2.3.1. Document structure
The structure of PHPDOC can be represented with the following element
tree. Each level in the tree represents the possible contents of the
tag on the level above.
- PHPDOC (1)
- FUNCDEF (*)
- ARG (*)
- text
- RETURNS (1?)
- text
- text
- text - any of these elements:
- AREF
- text except AREF
- FREF
- text except FREF
- FUNC
- text except FUNC
- VAR
- text except VAR
- LIT
- text except LIT
- CLASSREF
- text except CLASSREF
- CONFREF
- text except CONFREF
2.3.2. PHPDOC elements
This is a complete list of all PHPDOC tags with all their attributes
and an explaination of their purpose and usage.
- PHPDOC
- The top-level tag, the start tag must be included, but the
end-tag may be omitted. Attributes:
- TITLE (required)
- A title of this part of the documentation.
- FUNCDEF
- Documents a PHP function. Attributes:
- NAME (required)
- The function name.
- CAT (required)
- What category of functions and classes this function belongs to.
A list of valid categories may be added later.
- RET (required)
- What type this function returns. See phpdoc types for possible values.
- FIRSTIN (optional)
- Which PHP version this function first appeared in.
- ARG
- Function argument/parameter. Attributes:
- NAME (required)
- The parameter name (only for documentation reference).
- OPTIONAL (optional) defaults to MANDAT
- Can be empty (<ARG OPTIONAL ...>) or have the
value MANDAT or OPTIONAL. MANDAT means that this argument is
mandatory--it must be supplied.
- TYPE (required)
- The type of this argument. See phpdoc types for possible values.
- FIRSTIN (optional)
- Which PHP version this argument was introduced in (if it was
introduced later than the function was.)
- RETURNS
- Describes what a function returns. No attributes.
- AREF
- Refers to an argument in the current
FUNCDEF or
METHOD. Attributes:
- NAME (required)
- Name of the attribute given in the
ARG tag.
- FREF
- Refers to a function. Attributes:
- NAME (required)
- Name of the function referred to.
2.3.3 Variable types
- Several of PHPDOC's attributes take a PHP type as a
parameter. The permitted PHP type identifiers are:
-
Type |
Description |
int |
PHP's integer type |
float |
PHP's float type |
string |
PHP's string type |
array |
a numbered array of any PHP types |
assoc |
an associative array of any PHP types |
object |
an object |
mixed |
any PHP type |
varargs |
variable number of arguments, type not specified |
void |
nothing |
3. Connecting stuff
3.1. New PHPDOC files
The main file for the documentation is manual.sgml. This
file uses entities (can be compared to a combination of #define
and #include in C) to include text from other files. The entities
that include the PHPDOC files are defined in the preamble of
manual.sgml, which is the section between the "[" character
on the first (DOCTYPE) line and "]>".
Steps involved in connecting a new PHPDOC file:
- Let us say you have written functions/ldap.phpdoc. You should
then add this to the preamble:
<!entity ldapref system "functions/ldap.sgml">
This tells the SGML parser that when "ldapref" is referenced it
should read the file functions/ldap.sgml. Note
that the file name extension used here is not .phpdoc,
but .sgml. The Makefile handles the conversion.
- Refer to the ldapref entity where you want to include it.
Keep in mind that PHPDOC documents are converted into LINUXDOC
sections. Internal functions should be added to the "internal
functions" chapter in chapters/functions.sgml. Add
something like this (the bold part is what to add):
<chapt>Internal functions
...
&ldapref;
...
- Then, to make sure the .phpdoc file is converted to .sgml,
you have to tell make about it. Add the .sgml file to
the FUNCREF variable in Makefile.in. Example (the bold
text is the change):
FUNCREF=functions/oracle.sgml \
functions/ldap.sgml \
functions/math.sgml \
functions/mysql.sgml \
functions/pgsql.sgml \
functions/strings.sgml \
functions/adabas.sgml
- Finally, regenerate Makefile:
(cd .. ; ./config.status)
3.2. Label name conventions
When making or refering to labels in the LINUXDOC files, there are
some conventions that should kept:
- Internal functions have labels of the form
func:function_name.
- Arguments to configure (when installing) have labels like the
argument names. For example, the --with-system-regex option has
the label with_system_regex
4. Converting from SGML
4.1. HTML
You convert all the SGML files to HTML by running "make html".
The current Makefile setup splits the chapters and appendices into
separate files. The main file is called manual.html, and the
other files are manual-n.html.
If sgml2html shows some error messages like this:
sgml2html -l -2 manual.sgml
Making manual.html from manual.sgml.
Problem with @@ref(id = security)!
Problem with @@ref(id = func:include)!
Problem with @@ref(id = func:pg_pconnect)!
Problem with @@ref(id = func:stripslashes)!
..it is because of references that point to labels that do not exist.
See label name conventions.
4.2. Plain text
You convert all the SGML files to plain text by running "make
text". The results can be seen in manual.txt.
Note: there seems to be a bug in the 0.99.0 sgml2txt filter
that messes up the section numbering in the table of contents.
4.3 Other formats...
SGML-Tools supports converting SGML to info, LaTeX, lyx and rtf as
well. PHP's documentation should be convertable to any of these
formats in theory, but I have not tested it good enough to document it
here yet.
Send feedback and questions to
ssb@guardian.no