Preserve line breaks in scoped code

[hirasso]

Feature Request

Currently, quite some line breaks are being stripped from scoped code. This makes that code hard to read (I'm also scoping my own package's main code).

If it's technically possible, it would be amazing to preserve all line breaks / leave them untouched.

[theofidry]

I agree it would be best to preserve formatting if possible. I tried it at some point but had to give up as it requires more work, as PHP-Scoper modifies/inserts some statements.

There was an attempt done at #1051. I think nikic/PHP-Parser#1007 (comment) opened as part of that PR nikic/PHP-Parser#1007 (comment)

[hirasso]

If you ever solve this it would be amazing! I'm sure though you have enough on your plate 🥤

[hirasso]

Seems like others are struggling with the same problems.

Rector uses nikic/php-parser, built on technology called an abstract syntax tree (AST). An AST doesn't know about spaces and when written to a file it produces poorly formatted code in both PHP and docblock annotations.

[theofidry]

The problem is not so much the nature of AST: AST works fine because the formatting information is preserved as part of the nodes data. What is less clear and harder is knowing how to modify that formatting when inserting or removing nodes or alternatively how to handle incoherent token positions within the printer.

There is a native printer that somewhat handles this, but it's not clear to me if I'm missing something within PHP-Scoper or if there is more to address in the PHP-Parser printer