Symfony News

New in Symfony 6.2: Better PHP Translation Extractor

Contributed by
Mathieu Santostefano
in #46161.

Symfony includes a translation:extract command that looks for translatable contents in Twig templates and PHP files/classes to update the translation files with all the new contents found.

Behind the scenes, a PhpExtractor service uses the token_get_all() function to find those translatable strings. This works well in most cases, but it's increasingly difficult to add support for newer PHP features such as named arguments.

That's why in Symfony 6.2 we're introducing a new AST-based translation extractor. It uses the popular nikic/php-parser library to properly parse the contents of PHP files and process them as traversable nodes.

The new PhpAstExtractor service supports all kinds of trans() function calls, usages of TranslatableMessage class, messages defined in validation constraints, etc. Thanks to its solid AST-based foundation, we'll improve it and will add support for new PHP features much faster than before.

To use the new translation extractor, update your project to Symfony 6.2 and install the nikic/php-parser package using Composer. That's all. There's nothing else to configure or change in your project.