...A parser is useful for static analysis, manipulation of code and basically any other application dealing with code programmatically. A parser constructs an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) of the code and thus allows dealing with it in an abstract and robust way. As the parser is based on the tokens returned by token_get_all (which is only able to lex the PHP version it runs on), additionally a wrapper for emulating tokens from newer versions is provided. This allows to parse PHP 7.4 source code running on PHP 7.0, for example. ...