Parse Data of R Code as an ‘XML’ Tree
Convert the output of ‘utils::getParseData()’ to an ‘XML’ tree, that is searchable and easier to manipulate in general.
In recent R versions the parser can attach source code location information to the parsed expressions. This information is often useful for static analysis, e.g. code linting. It can be accessed via the utils::getParseData() function.
xmlparsedata converts this information to an XML tree. The R parser’s token names are preserved in the XML as much as possible, but some of them are not valid XML tag names, so they are renamed, see below.
utils::getParseData()utils::getParseData() summarizes the parse information in a data frame. The data frame has one row per expression tree node, and each node points to its parent. Here is a small example:
#> line1 col1 line2 col2 id parent token terminal text
#> 31 1 1 3 1 31 0 expr FALSE
#> 1 1 1 1 8 1 31 FUNCTION TRUE function
#> 2 1 9 1 9 2 31 '(' TRUE (
#> 3 1 10 1 10 3 31 SYMBOL_FORMALS TRUE a
#> 4 1 12 1 12 4 31 EQ_FORMALS TRUE =
#> 5 1 14 1 14 5 6 NUM_CONST TRUE 1
#> 6 1 14 1 14 6 31 expr FALSE
#> 7 1 15 1 15 7 31 ',' TRUE ,
#> 9 1 17 1 17 9 31 SYMBOL_FORMALS TRUE b
#> 10 1 19 1 19 10 31 EQ_FORMALS TRUE =
#> 11 1 21 1 21 11 12 NUM_CONST TRUE 2
#> 12 1 21 1 21 12 31 expr FALSE
#> 13 1 22 1 22 13 31 ')' TRUE )
#> 28 1 24 3 1 28 31 expr FALSE
#> 15 1 24 1 24 15 28 '{' TRUE {
#> 23 2 3 2 7 23 28 expr FALSE
#> 17 2 3 2 3 17 19 SYMBOL TRUE a
#> 19 2 3 2 3 19 23 expr FALSE
#> 18 2 5 2 5 18 23 '+' TRUE +
#> 20 2 7 2 7 20 22 SYMBOL TRUE b
#> 22 2 7 2 7 22 23 expr FALSE
#> 26 3 1 3 1 26 28 '}' TRUE }xml_parse_data()xmlparsedata::xml_parse_data() converts the parse information to an XML document. It works similarly to getParseData(). Specify the pretty = TRUE option to pretty-indent the XML output. Note that this has a small overhead, so if you are parsing large files, I suggest you omit it.
#> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"standalone="yes" ?>
#> <exprlist>
#> <expr line1="1" col1="1" line2="3" col2="1">
#> <FUNCTION line1="1" col1="1" line2="1" col2="8">function</FUNCTION>
#> <OP-LEFT-PAREN line1="1" col1="9" line2="1" col2="9">(</OP-LEFT-PAREN>
#> <SYMBOL_FORMALS line1="1" col1="10" line2="1" col2="10">a</SYMBOL_FORMALS>
#> <EQ_FORMALS line1="1" col1="12" line2="1" col2="12">=</EQ_FORMALS>
#> <expr line1="1" col1="14" line2="1" col2="14">
#> <NUM_CONST line1="1" col1="14" line2="1" col2="14">1</NUM_CONST>
#> </expr>
#> <OP-COMMA line1="1" col1="15" line2="1" col2="15">,</OP-COMMA>
#> <SYMBOL_FORMALS line1="1" col1="17" line2="1" col2="17">b</SYMBOL_FORMALS>
#> <EQ_FORMALS line1="1" col1="19" line2="1" col2="19">=</EQ_FORMALS>
#> <expr line1="1" col1="21" line2="1" col2="21">
#> <NUM_CONST line1="1" col1="21" line2="1" col2="21">2</NUM_CONST>
#> </expr>
#> <OP-RIGHT-PAREN line1="1" col1="22" line2="1" col2="22">)</OP-RIGHT-PAREN>
#> <expr line1="1" col1="24" line2="3" col2="1">
#> <OP-LEFT-BRACE line1="1" col1="24" line2="1" col2="24">{</OP-LEFT-BRACE>
#> <expr line1="2" col1="3" line2="2" col2="7">
#> <expr line1="2" col1="3" line2="2" col2="3">
#> <SYMBOL line1="2" col1="3" line2="2" col2="3">a</SYMBOL>
#> </expr>
#> <OP-PLUS line1="2" col1="5" line2="2" col2="5">+</OP-PLUS>
#> <expr line1="2" col1="7" line2="2" col2="7">
#> <SYMBOL line1="2" col1="7" line2="2" col2="7">b</SYMBOL>
#> </expr>
#> </expr>
#> <OP-RIGHT-BRACE line1="3" col1="1" line2="3" col2="1">}</OP-RIGHT-BRACE>
#> </expr>
#> </expr>
#> </exprlist>The top XML tag is <exprlist>, which is a list of expressions, each expression is an <expr> tag. Each tag has attributes that define the location: line1, col1, line2, col2. These are from the getParseData() data frame column names.
The R parser’s token names are preserved in the XML as much as possible, but some of them are not valid XML tag names, so they are renamed, see the xml_parse_token_map vector for the mapping:
#> '?' '~' '+' '-'
#> "OP-QUESTION" "OP-TILDE" "OP-PLUS" "OP-MINUS"
#> '*' '/' ':' '^'
#> "OP-STAR" "OP-SLASH" "OP-COLON" "OP-CARET"
#> '$' '@' '(' '['
#> "OP-DOLLAR" "OP-AT" "OP-LEFT-PAREN" "OP-LEFT-BRACKET"
#> ';' '{' '}' ')'
#> "OP-SEMICOLON" "OP-LEFT-BRACE" "OP-RIGHT-BRACE" "OP-RIGHT-PAREN"
#> '!' ']' ','
#> "OP-EXCLAMATION" "OP-RIGHT-BRACE" "OP-COMMA"xml2The xml2 package can search XML documents using XPath expressions. This is often useful to search for specific code patterns.
As an example we search a source file from base R for 1:nrow(<expr>) expressions, which are usually unsafe, as nrow() might be zero, and then the expression is equivalent to 1:0, i.e. c(1, 0), which is usually not the intended behavior.
We load and parse the file directly from the the R source code mirror at https://github.com/wch/r-source:
url <- paste0(
"https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wch/r-source/",
"4fc93819fc7401b8695ce57a948fe163d4188f47/src/library/tools/R/xgettext.R"
)
src <- readLines(url)
p <- parse(text = src, keep.source = TRUE)and we convert it to an XML tree:
The 1:nrow(<expr>) expression corresponds to the following tree in R:
<expr>
+-- <expr>
+-- NUM_CONST: 1
+-- ':'
+-- <expr>
+-- <expr>
+-- SYMBOL_FUNCTION_CALL nrow
+-- '('
+-- <expr>
+-- ')'#> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"standalone="yes" ?>
#> <exprlist>
#> <expr line1="1" col1="1" line2="1" col2="12">
#> <expr line1="1" col1="1" line2="1" col2="1">
#> <NUM_CONST line1="1" col1="1" line2="1" col2="1">1</NUM_CONST>
#> </expr>
#> <OP-COLON line1="1" col1="2" line2="1" col2="2">:</OP-COLON>
#> <expr line1="1" col1="3" line2="1" col2="12">
#> <expr line1="1" col1="3" line2="1" col2="6">
#> <SYMBOL_FUNCTION_CALL line1="1" col1="3" line2="1" col2="6">nrow</SYMBOL_FUNCTION_CALL>
#> </expr>
#> <OP-LEFT-PAREN line1="1" col1="7" line2="1" col2="7">(</OP-LEFT-PAREN>
#> <expr line1="1" col1="8" line2="1" col2="11">
#> <SYMBOL line1="1" col1="8" line2="1" col2="11">expr</SYMBOL>
#> </expr>
#> <OP-RIGHT-PAREN line1="1" col1="12" line2="1" col2="12">)</OP-RIGHT-PAREN>
#> </expr>
#> </expr>
#> </exprlist>This translates to the following XPath expression (ignoring the last tree tokens from the length(expr) expressions):
xp <- paste0(
"//expr",
"[expr[NUM_CONST[text()='1']]]",
"[OP-COLON]",
"[expr[expr[SYMBOL_FUNCTION_CALL[text()='nrow']]]]"
)We can search for this subtree with xml2::xml_find_all():
#> {xml_nodeset (1)}
#> [1] <expr line1="334" col1="19" line2="334" col2="27">\n<expr line1="334 ...There is only one hit, in line 334:
#> [,1] [,2]
#> [1,] "332" "\tcat(\"No errors\\n\")"
#> [2,] "333" " else"
#> [3,] "334" "\tfor (i in 1:nrow(x)) {"
#> [4,] "335" "\t if (is.na(x[i, 2L])) cols <- c(1L, 3:5)"
#> [5,] "336" "\t else cols <- 1:5"MIT © Mango Solutions