PHP4 regular expressions?

[sagedavis]

Hey all,
ok, so, I am a bit weird in my questions but, that's just me. I have a fairly weird one for you.

I have been using RegExSearchReplace (A Java Program) to do this the um, tedious way, but I was hoping there was an easier way to deal with this issue.

I have a huge project consisting of over 80 classes, each of which have several methods.

As this is an inherited project, I am having issues figure certain things out. There are several subfolders with include folders, and because htaccess has all of these folders as include folders, a lot of files are simply used with a require_one and no path name.

So, what I am wanting to do is, create a script that will search every file under a directory (including it's subdirectories), search for a certain thing, then add it to the database.

using the above mentioned java program, I can do the search, but I am doing the additions by hand, and it's getting a bit longwinded.

I cooked up these regular expressions to use with it.

/* Find a class */
(class )([a-zA-Z0-9]+)(.\{)

/*find a function or method */
(function )([a-zA-Z0-9]+)(.\{)

/* find new instance of a class*/
(\$[a-zA-Z0-9]+)(= new )([a-zA-Z0-9]+\(\))

Mind you, these are java regular expressions, and the ( and ) denote groups. I was figuring there might be some way to tap into groups, and say the value of group 3 is the function name, or whatever.

At any rate, how would I go about doing this to where I can simply click a button and trigger the script to run, and send the information that I am looking for into the database?
The problem is that I can't figure out how to use the infromation that is a match to the search expression, nor how to search through a directory and subdirs recursively.

At that point, it would be a good idea if I were able to also capture the file path and file name that these items reside in.

Any thoughts on this?
Mike

BTW: I'm aware of programs such as PHPdoc and so on, but these aren't going to help me. I would be required to actually go through each file and make specialized comment notation whic would pretty much defeat the purpous.