doxygen is parsing the PHP 'do' keyword as a variable. How can I change my code to prevent this?

Question

My PHP/HTML code with doxygen-formatted comments:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<?php
/** \file
* \brief php_doxygen_test.php demontrates that doxygen parses the keyword 'do' as a     variable in at least some cases.
*
* php_doxygen_test.php demontrates that doxygen parses the keyword 'do' as a variable in at least some cases. This
* was discovered for a 'do ... while' loop being used to display the contents of an array.
*/
?>
<html lang="en-us">
<head>
<title>PHP-Doxygen 'do ... while' Test</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>Array displayed via 'do ... while'</p>
<pre>
<?php
$starNames = array("Proxima Centauri", "Arcturus", "Sol", "Fomalhaut", "Deneb", "Rigel", "Zeta Ophiuchi"); /**< An indexed array of star names. */
$i = 0; /**< Counter for use in do ... while test. */
do {
  echo $starNames[$i] . "<br>";
  $i++;
} while ($i < count($starNames));
?>
</pre>
</body>
</html>

The PHP code runs fine. However, when I run doxygen (v1.8.5) on the file, it lists do as a variable in addition to $starNames and $i:

Variables
$starNames = array("Proxima Centauri", "Arcturus", "Sol", "Fomalhaut", "Deneb", "Rigel", "Zeta Ophiuchi")
$i = 0
do

In the Variable Documentation section, do is listed as:

do
Initial value:
{
  echo $starNames[$i] . "<br>"

Adding newlines before the do line or removing the echo line from the do loop does not stop doxygen parsing do as a variable. In my actual code, it is doing this for while and for loops as well. This greatly degrades the value of the documentation for my project!

Is there a way to change my PHP code so that doxygen doesn't do this? Alternately, is there a way to tell doxygen to not document 'do' as a variable?

I'm using:

doxygen 1.8.5
PHP 5.3.8
Apache 2.4.3
Windows 7 Home Premium SP1

For doxygen, I am using the 'Optimize for C or PHP output' configuration setting.

I've done numerous searches for this problem and have not found anything, including in doxygen's support archives, doxygen's Known Issues, and Stack Overflow.

doxygen doxygen · Accepted Answer · 2013-11-26T22:49:47

Doxygen expects functions, classes, modules, or namespaces when parsing the code, but not statements at the global level, as in your example.

So you should either wrap these statements in a function, or tell doxygen to ignore them using /** @cond */ .. /** @endcond */.

doxygen is parsing the PHP 'do' keyword as a variable. How can I change my code to prevent this?

1 Answers