[RESOLVED] cleaning up old code

[robkir]

I've been coding for a long enough time that I can barely remember the early programs and...they are a mess. I'm thinking of house cleaning but back then for some stupid reason, I kept a bunch of dead end programs. I could go through the each module and see which modules are included or hyperlinked to, but I was wondering if anybody had suggestions on how best to verify that a given module is still needed by other modules.

Thanks,

robkir

[laserlight]

A tool like grep could come in handy, though depending on how you wrote the code, it may or may not cover everything.

[bradgrafelman]

I would imagine some debuggers like XDebug or something along those lines would have features like call graphs and whatnot.

(At least, I know the same types of tools are available for languages like C/C++, so I can't imagine why a PHP equivalent or two wouldn't exist.)

[robkir]

Hi Brad,
XDebug for PHP does exist. I took a look at the documentation and its pretty thick. As always, thanks for the starting point. I expect I'll end up slogging through the code. Fortunately, there are no deadlines, just a need to clean up the deadwood.

[robkir]

Hi laserlight,

I checked out preg_grep and it might work on some of the code. thanks for the hint.

[NogDog]

You could do a file search on the file name in question, looking for other files that include, require, or otherwise access it. (This might not help if you use __autoload() to load class definitions, though.) Most decent editors have a search directory (and subdirectories) option.

[robkir]

I use pspad, a very cool program, that has that file search capability. That's probably the fastest and best way to check it out which files are actually in use. Of course it will be laborious, time consuming and...mind numbing. But then that's the price one pays to learn how to do this stuff.