imclab / macros

Aan easy way to define a pre-processor chain for your JavaScript source.

macros

macros is an easy way to define a pre-processor chain for your source.

The macro processor is combined of steps:

• Regex (string to string)
• Token Transformations (token to token)
• AST Transformations (valid JS AST to valid JS AST)
• Prepend (valid JS str to valid JS str)
• Append (valid JS str to valid JS str)
• require (valid JS str to module.exports object)

You define a file extension and a suite of filters that accepts source and returns transformed source.

Examples:

All of the steps are demonstrated in the test file

Regex:

Don't you wish JavaScript had easy parse-time string substitution? ;) Caution: as this is just a straight string substitution, you will probably blow up your code.

macros.register(".cjs", {
  regex: [
    [/development.local/, "example.com"]
  ]
});

Token:

If you want to twiddle your tokens, use this handy token-substitution device.

Example: decafscript is javascript where "f" is the same as "function". You can do it with a simple token transformation. all files with the ".ds" extension will treat "f" as the "function" keyword using this macro:

macros.register(".ds",{
  token: function(tok){
    if(tok.type == "name" && tok.value == "f"){
      tok.type = "keyword";
      tok.value = "function";
    }
    return tok;
  }
});

AST

If you want to do crazy transformations on your source tree, then you can modify the syntax tree directly. macros uses a fork of Uglify-JS, but the AST is the same.

Here's an example with substack's handy burrito! It will wrap all function calls with another function call :D

burrito = require("burrito");

macros.register(".trace", {
  ast: function(ast){
    var str = burrito(ast, function(node){
      if(node.name === 'call') node.wrap('wrapper(%s)'); 
    });
    return burrito.parse(str);
  }
});