Add some notes on plugins to the README

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Marijn Haverbeke 2015-03-20 21:29:29 +01:00
parent 35d0b80976
commit 1fc1d32e1f

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@ -336,3 +336,44 @@ register the Babel require shim like this:
require("babelify/node_modules/babel-core/register")
That will allow you to directly `require` the ES6 modules.
## Plugins
Acorn is designed support allow plugins which, within reasonable
bounds, redefine the way the parser works. Plugins can add new token
types and new tokenizer contexts (if necessary), and extend methods in
the parser object. This is not a clean, elegant API—using it requires
an understanding of Acorn's internals, and plugins are likely to break
whenever those internals are significantly changed. But still, it is
_possible_, in this way, to create parsers for JavaScript dialects
without forking all of Acorn. And in principle it is even possible to
combine such plugins, so that if you have, for example, a plugin for
parsing types and a plugin for parsing JSX-style XML literals, you
could load them both and parse code with both JSX tags and types.
A plugin should register itself by adding a property to
`acorn.plugins`, which holds a function. Calling `acorn.parse`, a
`plugin` option can be passed, holding an object mapping plugin names
to configuration values (or just `true` for plugins that don't take
options). After the parser object has been created, the initialization
functions for the chosen plugins are called with `(parser,
configValue)` arguments. They are expected to use the `parser.extend`
method to extend parser methods. For example, the `readToken` method
could be extended like this:
```javascript
parser.extend("readToken", function(nextMethod) {
return function(code) {
console.log("Reading a token!")
return nextMethod.call(this, code)
}
})
```
The `nextMethod` argument passed to `extend`'s second argument is the
previous value of this method, and should usually be called through to
whenever the extended method does not handle the call itself.
There is a proof-of-concept JSX plugin in the [`jsx`
branch](https://github.com/marijnh/acorn/tree/jsx) branch of the
Github repository.