Parsing incomplete statements with esprima

[Tobias Pflug]

Hi,

unsatisfied with the available options for javascript code completion in vim I recently spent some time evaluating some options.

What I ended up with was tunnelling expressions to a running phantomjs instance for inspection.

While that wasn't all that hard I realised that deciding what part of a line of text should actually be completed/inspected isn't

quite obvious or trivial. 

Now I'm wondering if esprima might be an option for this. I'd like to ask for some input if developers think that this is a feasible

usage scenario for esprima. From what i gathered by looking at the documentation and playing around in node it of course isn't

exactly meant for this purpose, i.e it will just fail if I pass it say "if (app.foo.someVal." but I guess scenarios like this could be

fixed/handled by balancing parens and removing trailing "." and such transforming te input to "if (app.foo.someVal) {}" before

passing it to esprima. In which case I could retrieve the last (only) identifier token as "app.foo.someVal" and inspect that.

Yet i'm far from being knowledgable on this topic so any kind of input would be appreciated. Is esprima completely wrong

for this ?

thanks in advance,

Tobi

[Ariya Hidayat]

Hi Tobi,

This one might be interesting for you:
http://ariya.ofilabs.com/2012/07/code-editing-with-autocompletion-in-eclipse-orion.html.

If Orion is too big, you might want to check out
https://github.com/scripted-editor/scripted/.

Let me know if you have more questions!


Regards,


--
Ariya Hidayat, http://ariya.ofilabs.com
http://twitter.com/ariyahidayat
http://gplus.to/ariyahidayat

[Andy Clement]

Hi,

Just fleshing out what Ariya mentioned.

Both orion and scripted are using the recoverable esprima fork from here:

https://github.com/aclement/esprima

there is an interactive demo of it here:

http://aclement.github.com/esprima/demo/parse.html

If I type in your example text:

if (app.foo.someVal.

you'll see it returns errors and an Ast.

It isn't finished yet but gives us enough to offer decent content assist in some key situations.

cheers,

Andy