grep-ast

Grep soure code files and see matching lines with useful context that show how they fit into the code. See the loops, functions, methods, classes, etc that contain all the matching lines. Get a sense of what's inside a matched class or function definition. You see relevant code from every layer of the abstract syntax tree, above and below the matches.

By default, grep-AST recurses the current directory to search all source code files. It respects .gitignore, so it will usually "do the right thing" in most repos if you just do grep-ast <regex> without specifying any filenames.

You can also invoke grep-ast as gast for convenience.

Grep-AST is built with tree-sitter and tree-sitter-languages. So it supports a lot of popular code languages.

Install

python -m pip install git+https://github.com/paul-gauthier/grep-ast.git

Usage

Basic usage:

grep-ast [pattern] [filenames...]

Full options list:

usage: grep_ast.py [-h] [-i] [--color] [--no-color] [--encoding ENCODING] [--languages] [--verbose]
                   [pat] [filenames ...]

positional arguments:
  pat                  the pattern to search for
  filenames            the files to display

options:
  -h, --help           show this help message and exit
  -i, --ignore-case    ignore case distinctions
  --color              force color printing
  --no-color           disable color printing
  --encoding ENCODING  file encoding
  --languages          print the parsers table
  --verbose            enable verbose output

Examples

Here we search for "encoding" in the source to this tool. These results mainly highlight how grep-ast shows you how the matches fit into the code base.

Here we search for "TreeContext" in the source to this tool. These results mainly highlight how grep-ast helps you understand the contents of a matching named code block (class, function, method, etc).