Esprima is a high performance, standard-compliant ECMAScript parser written in ECMAScript (also popularly known as JavaScript).
Esprima can be used to perform lexical analysis (tokenization) or syntactic analysis (parsing) of a JavaScript program.
A simple example on Node.js REPL:
> var esprima = require('esprima');
> var program = 'const answer = 42';
> esprima.tokenize(program);
[ { type: 'Keyword', value: 'const' },
{ type: 'Identifier', value: 'answer' },
{ type: 'Punctuator', value: '=' },
{ type: 'Numeric', value: '42' } ]
> esprima.parse(program);
{ type: 'Program',
body:
[ { type: 'VariableDeclaration',
declarations: [Object],
kind: 'const' } ],
sourceType: 'script' }
For more information, please read the complete documentation.
Once the full syntax tree is obtained, various static code analysis can be applied to give an insight to the code: syntax visualization, code validation, editing autocomplete (with type inferencing) and many others.
Regenerating the code from the syntax tree permits a few different types of code transformation, from a simple rewriting (with specific formatting) to a more complicated minification.
Esprima is created and maintained by Ariya Hidayat.