I was about to comment that this doesn't work for the general case: the str_replace cas alter strings in parameters e.g.
and stripComments can't be removed because it's used elsewhere

Good point.

I couldn't find any reference to stripComments but I guess it would be BC break as it's public...

I'll have another go!

Hmm unfortunately about 50% of my container is Proxy classes which are generated throughProxyGenerator and it's these classes which are being dumped with 'full' comments.

What about a more targeted preg_replace looking for opening and closing comments followed by keywords likeprivate,public,protected,class,interface ?

What about a more targeted preg_replace looking for opening and closing comments followed by keywords like private, public, protected, class, interface ?

That will fail when a parameter contains actual/**, and you can't say that will never happen (the first version of the php-cs-fixer used regexes and those were hard to get right all the time). Using a regex to strip comments in a language like PHP will fail one day.

One alternative solution would be to use a different tokenizer that doesn't load the tokens in memory but rather uses a stream or something.

indeed, quite a few examples of people struggling withtoken_get_all in these extreme cases and looking for streaming alternatives without success.