I've got a Node module file containing about 100 exported methods, which looks something like this:
exports.methodOne = async user_id => {
// other method contents
};
exports.methodTwo = async user_id => {
// other method contents
fooMethod();
};
exports.methodThree = async user_id => {
// other method contents
fooMethod();
};
Goal: What I'd like to do is figure out how to grab the name of any method which contains a call to fooMethod
, and return the correct method names: methodTwo and methodThree. I wrote a regex which gets kinda close:
exports\.(\w+).*(\n.*?){1,}fooMethod
Problem: using my example code from above, though, it would effectively match methodOne and methodThree because it finds the first instance of export
and then the first instance of fooMethod
and goes on from there. Here's a regex101 example.
I suspect I could make use of lookaheads or lookbehinds, but I have little experience with those parts of regex, so any guidance would be much appreciated!
Edit: Turns out regex is poorly-suited for this type of task. @ctcherry advised using a parser, and using that as a springboard, I was able to learn about Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs) and the recast tool which lets you traverse the tree after using various tools (acorn and others) to parse your code into tree form.
With these tools in hand, I successfully built a script to parse and traverse my node app's files, and was able to find all methods containing fooMethod
as intended.
Regex isn't the best tool to tackle all the parts of this problem, ideally we could rely on something higher level, a parser.
One way to do this is to let the javascript parse itself during load and execution. If your node module doesn't include anything that would execute on its own (or at least anything that would conflict with the below), you can put this at the bottom of your module, and then run the module with node mod.js
.
console.log(Object.keys(exports).filter(fn => exports[fn].toString().includes("fooMethod(")));
(In the comments below it is revealed that the above isn't possible.)
Another option would be to use a library like https://github.com/acornjs/acorn (there are other options) to write some other javascript that parses your original target javascript, then you would have a tree structure you could use to perform your matching and eventually return the function names you are after. I'm not an expert in that library so unfortunately I don't have sample code for you.