PHP 5.4 Short Arrays Converter

Command-line script to convert between array() and PHP 5.4's short syntax []. It uses native PHP tokenizer, so conversion is safe. The script was successfully tested against thousands of PHP files.

Download from GitHub

To convert all *.php and *.phpt files in whole directory recursively or to convert a single file use:

php convert.php <directory | file>

To convert source code from STDIN and print the output to STDOUT use:

php convert.php < input.php > output.php

To convert short syntax [] to older long syntax array() use option --reverse:

php convert.php --reverse [<directory | file>]