esdom

DEMO

Build up DOM from AST or AST from DOM. Just because DOM is something more familiar to web-developers than AST, though there are tools like esquery or ast-types. ESDOM is forward-compatible with esquery, so everything is done via esdom can be painlessly refactored to use esquery.

Works both in browsers and node.

$ npm install esdom

var esdom = require('esdom');
var esprima = require('esprima');
var escodegen = require('escodegen');
 
var ast = esprima.parse(code);
 
var el = esdom.toDOM(ast);
el.querySelector('Identifier').setAttribute('name', 'x');
ast = esdom.toAST(el);
 
escodegen.print(ast);

Mapping nodes

Mapping is done to be compatible with ESQuery selectors as much as possible.

Let’s take an examplary source:

var a = 1;

AST for the source will be:

{
    "type": "Program",
    "body": [
        {
            "type": "VariableDeclaration",
            "declarations": [
                {
                    "type": "VariableDeclarator",
                    "id": {
                        "type": "Identifier",
                        "name": "a"
                    },
                    "init": {
                        "type": "Literal",
                        "value": 1,
                        "raw": "1"
                    }
                }
            ],
            "kind": "var"
        }
    ]
}

And resulting HTML:

<program class="Program Node Printable" type="Program" body="[]">
    <variabledeclaration class="VariableDeclaration Declaration Statement Node Printable" type="VariableDeclaration" declarations="[]" kind="var" prop="body">
        <variabledeclarator class="VariableDeclarator Node Printable" type="VariableDeclarator" id="Identifier" init="Literal" prop="declarations">
            <identifier class="Identifier Expression Pattern Node Printable" type="Identifier" name="a" prop="id"></identifier>
            <literal class="Literal Expression Pattern Node Printable" type="Literal" value="1" raw="1" prop="init"></literal>
        </variabledeclarator>
    </variabledeclaration>
</program>

So all esquery css selectors work just fine with that html, with some exceptions:

• :first-child and :last-child selectors always return non-empty result, where esquery may return nothing. For example, selector VariableDeclarator > Identifier:first-child returns <Identifier>, where esquery returns null.
• Nested attribute selector should be replaced with subject indicator (or :has): [attr.subAttr=xyz] → ![attr] > [subAttr=xyz]
• To select custom esquery pseudos like :statement, it is recommended to use esdom/query, otherwise it should be replaced with natural DOM class .Statement.
• Regular expression and conditional selectors should be replaced with according css selectors.

In all other regards it works just the same.

Notes

• esquery is inable to select list of nodes, like all function params, or all function body statements. With esdom you can do .Function > [prop="params"].
• esdom might be somewhat slow in browsers due to using browser API. In node, DOM is emulated via dom-lite, so it’s times faster.
• esdom work only with ES5.

Analysis

ESDOM also provides helpful scope/variable analysis, marking nodes with additional data- attributes. To analyze DOM, call esdom.analyze(dom), and it will set attributes:

API