Compatibility updates required

This package / library / plugin is severely outdated, and no longer operates correctly on PHP 8.1.
I believe this library needs a fundamental rewrite.

Unfortunately the main dependency of it, "phpdocumentor/reflection" : "~3.0", (PHP 5.3.3+) has made several rewrites of the library in v4, v5, and v6. https://github.com/phpDocumentor/Reflection/releases
Additionally, v5.2 supported PHP >=7.2 (PHP8 support unknown), but v5.3 requires PHP 7.4/8.x, and v6 is PHP 8.1+ only.

I have previously gone done this path, and there's some changes here, but I have no recollection of the status or whether it worked / etc. https://github.com/WordPress/phpdoc-parser/compare/master...dd32:phpdoc-parser:try/upgrade-phpdocumentor

If you incorrectly run the parser on the develop.svn checkout without specifying the src/ folder as the base to parse, it'll run into this error on PHP 7.4 + WP 6.5+, which I'm assuming is newer PHP syntax that the parser doesn't understand in the tests/ folder.

[28-Apr-2025 03:14:29 UTC] PHP Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Object of class PhpParser\Node\Stmt\Class_ could not be converted to string in /var/www/html/wp-content/plugins/phpdoc-parser/vendor/phpdocumentor/reflection/src/phpDocumentor/Reflection/BaseReflector.php:172

But even without tests/ included, parsing will often throw errors like Parse Error: Syntax error, unexpected '?', expecting T_VARIABLE on line 62 Parse Error: Syntax error, unexpected '?', expecting T_VARIABLE on line 127 and I have no idea what impact that is having :)

ref https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/7963 https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/7964

Start by reviewing the existing upgrade attempt and reproducing the parser failures on PHP 7.4 and 8.1, comparing behavior with and without the src/ base path. Inspect vendor/phpdocumentor/reflection/src/phpDocumentor/Reflection/BaseReflector.php and the parser's tests/ handling. Done means the parser works with the supported PHP 8.1-era dependency and no longer reports the described syntax or object-conversion errors.