To help you get started, we've collected the most common ways that tree-sitter is being used within popular public projects.

atom / atom / src / tree-sitter-language-mode.js View on Github

constructor ({buffer, grammar, config}) {
    this.id = nextId++
    this.buffer = buffer
    this.grammar = grammar
    this.config = config
    this.document = new Document()
    this.document.setInput(new TreeSitterTextBufferInput(buffer))
    this.document.setLanguage(grammar.languageModule)
    this.document.parse()
    this.rootScopeDescriptor = new ScopeDescriptor({scopes: [this.grammar.id]})
    this.emitter = new Emitter()
    this.isFoldableCache = []

    // TODO: Remove this once TreeSitterLanguageMode implements its own auto-indentation system. This
    // is temporarily needed in order to delegate to the TextMateLanguageMode's auto-indent system.
    this.regexesByPattern = {}
  }

View more ways to use tree-sitter

node tree-sitter

Incremental parsers for node

Installation

npm install tree-sitter

Usage

First, you'll need a Tree-sitter grammar for the language you want to parse. There are many existing grammars such as tree-sitter-javascript and tree-sitter-go. You can also develop a new grammar using the Tree-sitter CLI.

Once you've got your grammar, create a parser with that grammar.

const Parser = require('tree-sitter');
const JavaScript = require('tree-sitter-javascript');

const parser = new Parser();
parser.setLanguage(JavaScript);

Then you can parse some source code,

const sourceCode = 'let x = 1; console.log(x);';
const tree = parser.parse(sourceCode);

and inspect the syntax tree.

console.log(tree.rootNode.toString());

// (program
//   (lexical_declaration
//     (variable_declarator (identifier) (number)))
//   (expression_statement
//     (call_expression
//       (member_expression (identifier) (property_identifier))
//       (arguments (identifier)))))

const callExpression = tree.rootNode.child(1).firstChild;
console.log(callExpression);

// { type: 'call_expression',
//   startPosition: {row: 0, column: 16},
//   endPosition: {row: 0, column: 30},
//   startIndex: 0,
//   endIndex: 30 }

If your source code changes, you can update the syntax tree. This will take less time than the first parse.

// Replace 'let' with 'const'
const newSourceCode = 'const x = 1; console.log(x);';

tree.edit({
  startIndex: 0,
  oldEndIndex: 3,
  newEndIndex: 5,
  startPosition: {row: 0, column: 0},
  oldEndPosition: {row: 0, column: 3},
  newEndPosition: {row: 0, column: 5},
});

const newTree = parser.parse(newSourceCode, tree);

Parsing Text From a Custom Data Structure

If your text is stored in a data structure other than a single string, you can parse it by supplying a callback to parse instead of a string:

const sourceLines = [
  'let x = 1;',
  'console.log(x);'
];

const tree = parser.parse((index, position) => {
  let line = sourceLines[position.row];
  if (line) {
    return line.slice(position.column);
  }
});