Php psalm configuration and syntax error reporting

Question

I have a case with a simple syntax error. It goes like this

class Foo
{
    public function __construct($a,$b,$c,) {...}

So, there is an syntax error after param $c -- an excess comma (im using php7.3). When i run psalm ./vendor/bin/psalm src/Foo.php --no-cache it shows that nothing is broken here.

My question is am i missing some config or something else, why do psalm do not catch that simple syntax error case?

Answer 1

With php8 this code no longer brings errors:

<?php
class Foo
{
    public function __construct($a,$b,$c,) {}
}

Try it self.

I suspect psalm may already take that into account.

The decisive factor is which errors PHP itself delivers and not what any IDE or other tools display.

Answer 2

Parse errors Psalm reports are generated by nikic/php-parser which Psalm uses under the hood, and the parser itself does not distinguish between PHP 8 and PHP 7 syntax.

The only reason Psalm reports parse errors at all is that it can't understand syntactically incorrect code. It's not Psalm's goal to find any syntax errors, there are a lot of tools that do that.

Thus you should be using a proper syntax checker, either php -l directly or some wrapper like php-parallel-lint/php-parallel-lint.