PHP SQL Strings

Better syntax highlighting for SQL statements, fragments, subqueries, and expressions inside PHP strings.

PHP SQL Strings extends VS Code's built-in PHP highlighting so embedded SQL remains easy to scan and edit, including complete statements, query fragments, subqueries, and standalone expressions.

Features

• Highlights complete SQL statements.
• Highlights query fragments such as WHERE, CASE, JOIN, ORDER BY, and RETURNING.
• Highlights standalone SQL function expressions such as ROW_NUMBER() OVER (...), COUNT(...), and COALESCE(...).
• Uses more lenient leading-whitespace detection, including blank lines and indentation before a recognized SQL keyword or function.
• Supports wrapping parentheses for subqueries and expression fragments, including parentheses placed before the first recognized SQL token or on their own lines.
• Makes SQL and DQL heredocs/nowdocs styling match their string counterparts.
• Recognizes a broad set of keywords and built-in functions from VS Code's SQL grammar, plus common SQL dialect keywords.

Examples

<?php

$query = "
	SELECT
		id,
		email
	FROM
		users
";

$subquery = "
	(
		WITH
			active AS (
				SELECT
					id
				FROM
					users
			)

		SELECT * FROM active
	)
";

$case = "
	CASE
		WHEN paid < total
		THEN 'Unpaid'

		ELSE 'Paid'
	END
";

$join = "
	LEFT JOIN
		accounts ON TRUE
		AND accounts.id = users.account_id
		AND accounts.deleted IS NULL
";

$where     = "WHERE status = 'active'";
$ordering  = "(ORDER BY created_at DESC)";
$ranking   = "ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY account_id ORDER BY created_at)";
$aggregate = "COUNT(DISTINCT user_id)";
$distinct  = "DISTINCT user_id";

Detection

To avoid treating every PHP string as SQL, detection skips leading whitespace and wrapping opening parentheses, then requires either a recognized uppercase SQL keyword or a recognized uppercase SQL function name followed by (. Once detected, the rest of the string is highlighted using VS Code's SQL grammar.

The heredoc override supports uppercase SQL, "SQL", DQL, and "DQL" labels; nowdocs support 'SQL' and 'DQL'.

Development

Install the test dependencies and run the grammar regression suite:

npm install
npm test

Refresh the SQL keyword/function source from microsoft/vscode-mssql and regenerate the detector:

npm run build

The networked update downloads extensions/mssql/syntaxes/SQL.plist directly from vscode-mssql's main branch, validates it, and writes the converted grammar fixture to test/fixtures. The checked-in fixture keeps grammar-only builds and tests offline; refreshing it intentionally follows the latest upstream main content.

Use npm run update:sql-grammar to refresh only the fixture, or npm run build:grammar to regenerate from the checked-in fixture without a network request. The editable injection grammar is the String.raw template in scripts/grammar-template.mjs; the JSON file under syntaxes/ is generated and should not be edited directly.