How to use Clang as a library

Question

I am doing my dissertation and I have to parse and tokenize the source code into individual functions. For every function I would like to extract names of types, called function names and type casts. Is the clang the right tool for that kind of job? If yes how can i do this?

Below is a simple C function. With bold are the extracted items I want:

static char func1(unsigned int a, struct foo *b)
{
    int c = 0;
    struct bar *d;

    if (a == 0) {
        d = func2((int) a);
    } else {
        c = func3((struct bar *) b);
    }

    return c;
}

Answer 1

Yes, Clang is the right tool to do this job.

You should take a look a libclang.

You can find enough information on internet, but I personally can recommend two great articles:

Parsing C++ in Python with Clang by Eli Bendersky

Introduction to libclang by Mike Ash

If you prefer to watch videos, then I can recommend to look at the presentation on libclang here: 2010 LLVM Developers' Meeting, look for libclang: Thinking Beyond the Compiler