luaparse

A Lua parser written in JavaScript, for my bachelor's thesis at Arcada.

Installation

Install through bower install luaparse or npm install luaparse.

Usage

CommonJS

var parser = require('luaparse');
var ast = parser.parse('i = 0');
console.log(JSON.stringify(ast));

AMD

require(['luaparse'], function(parser) {
  var ast = parser.parse('i = 0');
  console.log(JSON.stringify(ast));
});

Browser

<script src="luaparse.js"></script>
<script>
var ast = luaparse.parse('i = 0');
console.log(JSON.stringify(ast));
</script>

Parser Interface

Basic usage:

luaparse.parse(code, options);

The output of the parser is an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) formatted in JSON.

The available options are:

• wait: false Explicitly tell the parser when the input ends.
• comments: true Store comments as an array in the chunk object.
• scope: false Track identifier scopes.
• locations: false Store location information on each syntax node.
• ranges: false Store the start and end character locations on each syntax node.

The default options are also exposed through luaparse.defaultOptions where they can be overriden globally.

There is a second interface which might be preferable when using the wait option.

var parser = luaparse.parse({ wait: true });
parser.write('foo = "');
parser.write('bar');
var ast = parser.end('"');

This would be identical to:

var ast = luaparse.parse('foo = "bar"');

AST format

If the following code is executed:

luaparse.parse('foo = "bar"');

then the returned value will be:

{
  "type": "Chunk",
  "body": [
    {
      "type": "AssignmentStatement",
      "variables": [
        {
          "type": "Identifier",
          "name": "foo"
        }
      ],
      "init": [
        {
          "type": "StringLiteral",
          "value": "bar",
          "raw": "\"bar\""
        }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "comments": []
}

Custom AST

The default AST structure is somewhat inspired by the Mozilla Parser API but can easily be overriden to customize the structure or to inject custom logic.

luaparse.ast is an object containing all functions used to create the AST, if you for example wanted to trigger an event on node creations you could use the following:

var luaparse = require('luaparse'),
    events = new (require('events').EventEmitter);

Object.keys(luaparse.ast).forEach(function(type) {
  var original = luaparse.ast[type];
  luaparse.ast[type] = function() {
    var node = original.apply(null, arguments);
    events.emit(node.type, node);
    return node;
  };
});
events.on('Identifier', function(node) { console.log(node); });
luaparse.parse('i = "foo"');

Lexer

The lexer used by luaparse can be used independently of the recursive descent parser. The lex function is exposed as luaparse.lex() and it will return the next token up until EOF is reached.

Each token consists of:

• type expressed as an enum flag which can be matched with luaparse.tokenTypes.
• value
• line, lineStart
• range can be used to slice out raw values, eg. foo = "bar" will return a StringLiteral token with the value bar. Slicing out the range on the other hand will return "bar".

var parser = luaparse.parse('foo = "bar"');
parser.lex(); // { type: 8, value: "foo", line: 1, lineStart: 0, range: [0, 3] }
parser.lex(); // { type: 32, value: "=", line: 1, lineStart: 0, range: [4, 5]}
parser.lex(); // { type: 2, value: "bar", line: 1, lineStart: 0, range: [6, 11] }
parser.lex(); // { type: 1, value: "<eof>", line: 1, lineStart: 0, range: [11 11] }
parser.lex(); // { type: 1, value: "<eof>", line: 1, lineStart: 0, range: [11 11] }

Examples

Have a look in the examples directory of the repository for some code examples or check them out live.

luaparse(1)

The luaparse executable can be used in your shell by installing luaparse globally using npm:

$ npm install -g luaparse
$ luaparse --help

Usage: luaparse [option]... [file|code]...

Options:
  -c|--code [code]   parse code snippet
  -f|--file [file]   parse from file
  -b|--beautify      output an indenteted AST
  --[no]-comments    store comments. defaults to true
  --[no]-scope       store variable scope. defaults to false
  --[no]-locations   store location data on syntax nodes. defaults to false
  --[no]-ranges      store start and end character locations. defaults to false
  -q|--quiet         suppress output
  -h|--help
  -v|--version
  --verbose

Examples:
  luaparse --no-comments -c "locale foo = \"bar\""
  luaparse foo.lua bar.lua

Example usage

$ luaparse "i = 0"

{"type":"Chunk","body":[{"type":"AssignmentStatement","variables":[{"type":"Identifier","name":"i"}],"init":[{"type":"NumericLiteral","value":0,"raw":"0"}]}],"comments":[]}

Support

Has been tested in at least IE6+, Firefox 3+, Safari 4+, Chrome 10+, Opera 10+, Node 0.4.0+, RingoJS 0.8-0.9, Narwhal 0.3.2, Rhino 1.7R4-1.7R5.

Quality Assurance

TL;DR simply run make qa. This will run all quality assurance scripts but assumes you have it set up correctly.

Begin by cloning the repository and installing the development dependencies with npm install. To test AMD loading for browsers you should run bower install which will download RequireJS.

The luaparse test suite uses testem as a test runner, and because of this it's very easy to run the tests using different javascript engines or even on locally installed browsers. Currently the default runner uses PhantomJS and node so when using make test or npm test you should have PhantomJS installed.

Test runners

• make test uses PhantomJS and node.
• make testem-engines uses PhantomJS, node, narwhal, ringo, rhino and rhino 1.7R5. This requires that you have the engines installed.
• make test-node uses a custom command line reporter to make the output easier on the eyes while practicing TDD.
• By installing testem globally you can also run the tests in a locally installed browser.

Other quality assurance measures

• You can check the function complexity using complexity-report using make complexity-analysis
• Running make coverage will generate the coverage report. To simply check that all code has coverage you can run make coverage-analysis.
• make lint, make benchmark, make profile.

Documentation

By running make docs all documentation will be generated.

Projects using luaparse

• luamin, a Lua minifier written by Mathias Bynens.
• Ace, an online code editor.

Acknowledgements

• Initial tests are scaffolded from yueliang and then manually checked for error.
• Much of the code is based on LuaMinify, the Lua source and Esprima. All awesome projects.

License

MIT