Detects inline associative array literals that appear many times with the same shape (ordered keys + value kinds) across a component. Shape-level repetition is a strong signal that the call sites should share a helper constructor — e.g. the ubiquitous ['success' => false, 'error' => $x, 'message' => $y] envelope should become error_envelope($error, $message).

What counts as a shape

A shape is the ordered tuple of (key, value_kind) pairs, where value_kind is one of: bool, int, string, null, var, expr. Concrete values are discarded — only structure matters. PHP’s array order is preserved (keys are not sorted).

Two literals with the same keys in a different order are distinct shapes; two literals with the same keys and compatible value kinds in the same order collapse to one shape.

Scope

• Language: PHP only for the first pass.
• Syntax: [...] short arrays and array(...) long arrays.
• Positional/list-only arrays (no => arrows) are intentionally skipped — they are rarely interesting for helper extraction.
• Nested literals inside a value are treated as a single expr token; the detector does not recurse on the first pass.

Threshold

A finding is emitted when a shape occurs at least 20 times across the component. The finding description lists:

• The shape signature (keys + value kinds).
• Total occurrence count.
• Top three files by occurrence count.
• An estimated LOC reduction if the shape is extracted into a helper.

Severity

Info — the detector reports the repeated shape, candidate files, and estimated LOC reduction, but no automated fixer is registered and no rewrites are applied automatically.

Related

• repeated_field_pattern — the same idea applied to struct/class field declarations instead of inline literals.