I checked for a flag in this page http://dlang.org/dmd-linux.html , but couldn't have found any for this purpose.

Is there a way to parse a d source file so it generates a tree in JSON, XML, or something-that-can-be-processed-easily file format?

---

My real purpose:

I need to generate hash code (e.g. MD5) for a part of source code (let's say a class, struct, or a function). So whether the codes are changed or not can be detected. As you will guess, comments, text formatting etc. shouldn't affect the hash result.


Use-Case:

I am writing a code generator/back up system. It will check the last available code file. If important changes are done in a specific part of code, it will increase version number by 1.

On 09/11/15 6:49 PM, tcak wrote:
> I checked for a flag in this page http://dlang.org/dmd-linux.html , but
> couldn't have found any for this purpose.
>
> Is there a way to parse a d source file so it generates a tree in JSON,
> XML, or something-that-can-be-processed-easily file format?
>
> ---
>
> My real purpose:
>
> I need to generate hash code (e.g. MD5) for a part of source code (let's
> say a class, struct, or a function). So whether the codes are changed or
> not can be detected. As you will guess, comments, text formatting etc.
> shouldn't affect the hash result.
>
>
> Use-Case:
>
> I am writing a code generator/back up system. It will check the last
> available code file. If important changes are done in a specific part of
> code, it will increase version number by 1.

There is a json output, but it hasn't been all that maintained.
Use something like DScanner, instead.

On Monday, 9 November 2015 at 05:49:25 UTC, tcak wrote:
> I checked for a flag in this page http://dlang.org/dmd-linux.html , but couldn't have found any for this purpose.
>
> Is there a way to parse a d source file so it generates a tree in JSON, XML, or something-that-can-be-processed-easily file format?
>
> ---
>
> My real purpose:
>
> I need to generate hash code (e.g. MD5) for a part of source code (let's say a class, struct, or a function). So whether the codes are changed or not can be detected. As you will guess, comments, text formatting etc. shouldn't affect the hash result.
>
>
> Use-Case:
>
> I am writing a code generator/back up system. It will check the last available code file. If important changes are done in a specific part of code, it will increase version number by 1.

You could write your own tool using libdparse[1]: parse, visit the AST, create a signature for the declarations that are interesting.

---
https://github.com/Hackerpilot/libdparse

On Monday, 9 November 2015 at 05:49:25 UTC, tcak wrote:
> I checked for a flag in this page http://dlang.org/dmd-linux.html , but couldn't have found any for this purpose.
>
> Is there a way to parse a d source file so it generates a tree in JSON, XML, or something-that-can-be-processed-easily file format?
>
> ---
>
> My real purpose:
>
> I need to generate hash code (e.g. MD5) for a part of source code (let's say a class, struct, or a function). So whether the codes are changed or not can be detected. As you will guess, comments, text formatting etc. shouldn't affect the hash result.
>
>
> Use-Case:
>
> I am writing a code generator/back up system. It will check the last available code file. If important changes are done in a specific part of code, it will increase version number by 1.

You're use case is really interesting! AFAIK, currently, the lexer part of the DMD frontend is the only part that can be easily used standalone. Daniel Murphy (who drove a lot of the work towards DDMD) published the lexer on DUB: http://code.dlang.org/packages/ddmd. However the package is outdated, because it is based on DMD v2.067.
As the whole frontend is now in D, you should be able to import any of the D modules and work with them, but it may not be as easy, as their API is geared only towards the DMD driver.
I personally want to help refactor DDMD to be usable as a library, so you can use for all sorts of cool things (like runtime JIT, IDE support, REPL, and so on), but I'm quite busy at the moment :(

On Monday, 9 November 2015 at 05:49:25 UTC, tcak wrote:
> I checked for a flag in this page http://dlang.org/dmd-linux.html , but couldn't have found any for this purpose.
>
> Is there a way to parse a d source file so it generates a tree in JSON, XML, or something-that-can-be-processed-easily file format?
>
> ---
>
> My real purpose:
>
> I need to generate hash code (e.g. MD5) for a part of source code (let's say a class, struct, or a function). So whether the codes are changed or not can be detected. As you will guess, comments, text formatting etc. shouldn't affect the hash result.
>
>
> Use-Case:
>
> I am writing a code generator/back up system. It will check the last available code file. If important changes are done in a specific part of code, it will increase version number by 1.

dscanner --ast path/to/file.d \
    | xmllint --xpath "//classDeclaration[name='ClassYouCareAbout']" - \
    | md5sum

https://github.com/Hackerpilot/Dscanner

The only problem here is that D-Scanner's XML output includes <ddoc> tags. You should be able to strip those out with sed or something.