Build fails to restore PHP code used as standalone HTML attributes

[mocny]

Description
vite-plugin-php fails to restore PHP placeholders during build when PHP is used as a standalone HTML attribute (boolean / attribute injection). DEV works correctly.

Affected pattern

<div value="val" <?php echo $variable; ?>>Content</div>

Build output (incorrect)

<div value="val" php_code_placeholder_1="">Content</div>

The PHP placeholder is not converted back to PHP value.

Working patterns
PHP inside an attribute value works as expected:

<div value="val <?php echo $variable; ?>">Content</div>

PHP as node content also works:

<div value="val"><?php echo $variable; ?></div>

Expected behavior: Standalone PHP attributes (commonly used for checked, selected, disabled, data-*, etc.) should be restored correctly during build.

Suspected cause: The placeholder tracking / reverse-mapping logic does not handle PHP blocks that appear as full attributes (not inside quoted values).

Impact: Prevents valid PHP/HTML patterns commonly used for conditional attributes.

Suggestion: Extend the parser / placeholder restore logic to support PHP blocks that represent entire attributes, not only quoted attribute values or node content.

[donnikitos]

Hi @mocny,
thanks for using the plugin an submitting the issue - I will have a look into it.

In the meantime you can check out if the beta release is addressing this issue.
You can install it with

npm i vite-plugin-php@beta

The whole pipeline was reworked and potentially fixes your issue as well!

[mocny]

Hi @donnikitos, indeed beta version of 3.0.0 is devoid of this issue! I wondered how I could access v3 since I saw it on npmjs, so thanks for that :) I will just test it later on with more complex projects how it behaves.

And thank you very much for you work on this plugin, I am using and playing with it since 1.0.5 and I really like how you improved it since then 👍 I was actually doing tweaks in 1.0.6+ versions for having an option (new config params) for custom php and js tokens, since those defaults (/*${token}*/, <!--${token}-->, mostly just that php wrapper - being a comment) were messing with some other options I had - I think this was mostly due to vite-plugin-html during build (where comments were conflicting I guess with it's removeComments config param). Altough this was fixed by you switching to (\u2400\u2400${token}\u2400\u2400 for php wrapper), an option for those params in v 3 is very much welcomed, if possible (in case it would be crashing with something else). I actually did not had much time to get into workings of github, so I could not contribute directly back then.

[donnikitos]

Thank you for the kind word @mocny! And I am glad you are enjoying the plugin :)
Atm I don't think it's necessary to implement an additional param, since it's veeeeery unlikely, that somebody will use the null char. But even if, it's probably better to open another issue separately.

BTW. since you are enjoying the plugin be sure to check out the updated and improved starter repository: https://github.com/nititech/modern-php-vite-starter!
The benefit of the new pipeline is, that now we can do PHP transforms on the fly. We even created additional plugins, which you can use to have premade PHP-components.