ltreesitter

Tree sitter bindings for Lua

Documentation

Documentation can be found at this repo's github pages (Which are autogenerated using the Teal script scripts/gen.tl)

Installation

ltreesitter is avaliable on luarocks

luarocks install ltreesitter

or the latest main branch

luarocks install --dev ltreesitter

Examples

Looking for a quick start? These snippets should be descriptive enough to get you started. If you need more detail, take a look at the documentation

Setup

Loading parsers you have installed on your system

local ltreesitter = require("ltreesitter")

ltreesitter.require

Assuming you have a compiled c parser named c.so (or c.dll on windows) in ~/.tree-sitter/bin/ or package.cpath

local c_parser = ltreesitter.require("c")

You have a parser.so (or .dll) with the symbol tree_sitter_lua to load the language

local lua_parser = ltreesitter.require("parser", "lua")

ltreesitter.load

load will just directly load from the filename given.

local local_c_parser = ltreesitter.load("./c-parser.so", "c")

Using a path without a path separator may have unintended consequences, so when in doubt, include a leading ./ or use an absolute path.

For more information, look into how dlopen and LoadLibrary find paths.

Basic parsing and usage of trees and nodes

local source_code = [[
#include <stdio.h>

// a function that does stuff
static void stuff_doer(void) {
    printf("I'm doing stuff! :D\n");
}

int main(int argc, char **argv) {
    stuff_doer();
    return 0;
}
]]

local tree = c_parser:parse_string(source_code)
print(tree) -- tostring (which print calls automatically) will return the string of s-expressions of trees and nodes

for child in tree:root():named_children() do -- some iterators over nodes' children are provided
   print(child)
end

Queries

Using the above c_parser and tree

-- Grab the names of all functions
local my_query = c_parser:query[[
    (translation_unit
      (function_definition
        declarator: (function_declarator
                      declarator: (identifier) @name))) ]]

for capture, capture_name in my_query:capture(tree:root()) do -- iterate over captured nodes without caring about order
   -- Node:source() gives the source code that the node comes from
   print(capture:source(), capture_name) -- => "stuff_doer", "name" and "main", "name"
end

for match in my_query:match(tree:root()) do
   print(match.captures["name"]:source()) -- => "stuff_doer" and "main"
end