ECMAScript parsing infrastructure for multipurpose analysis

Esprima is a high performance, standard-compliant ECMAScript parser written in ECMAScript (also popularly known as JavaScript).

Features

API

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.