In July 2010 I already blogged about the fact that HipHop for PHP, the source code transformer that turns PHP code into C++ code that can then be compiled with g++, can also be used for static code analysis to find problems in PHP source code.

Today I started to work on a convenience wrapper for HipHop's static analyzer:

➜  ~  hphpa /usr/local/src/code-coverage/PHP
hphpa 1.0.0 by Sebastian Bergmann.

/usr/local/src/code-coverage/PHP/CodeCoverage/Filter.php
  206   TooManyArgument: $this->addFileToWhitelist($file, FALSE)

Of course the tool can also generate an XML logfile in a format that is suitable for continuous integration:

➜  ~  hphpa --checkstyle hphpa.xml --quiet /usr/local/src/code-coverage/PHP
hphpa 1.0.0 by Sebastian Bergmann.

➜  ~  cat hphpa.xml
<checkstyle>
 <file name="/usr/local/src/code-coverage/PHP/CodeCoverage/Filter.php">
  <error line="206"
         message="$this->addFileToWhitelist($file, FALSE)"
         source="TooManyArgument"/>
 </file>
</checkstyle>