📣 Important notices
If you are upgrading from an older version, please note that version 3 ships with numerous breaking changes to the public API because virtually all areas of the library have been revised. Documentation of the previous major version is available here.

Esprima .NET (BSD license) is a .NET port of the esprima.org project. It is a standard-compliant ECMAScript parser (also popularly known as JavaScript).

Features

• Full support for ECMAScript 2022 (ECMA-262 13th Edition)
• Support for a few upcoming (stage 3+ proposal) ECMAScript features:
  • Decorators,
  • Import attributes,
  • Duplicate named capturing groups in regular expressions.
• Experimental support for JSX, a syntax extension for React
• Sensible syntax tree format, which is based on the standard established by the ESTree project
• Tracking of syntax node location (index-based and line-column)
• Heavily tested

API

Esprima can be used to perform lexical analysis (tokenization) or syntactic analysis (parsing) of a JavaScript program.

A simple C# example:

var parser = new JavaScriptParser();
var program = parser.ParseScript("const answer = 42");

You can control the behavior of the parser by initializing and passing a ParserOptions to the parser's constructor. (For the available options, see the XML documentation of the ParserOptions class.)

Instead of ParseScript, you may use ParseModule or ParseExpression to make the parser treat the input as an ES6 module or as a plain JavaScript expression respectively.

In case the input is syntactically correct, each of these methods returns the root node of the resulting abstract syntax tree (AST), which you can freely analyze or transform. The library provides the AstVisitor and AstRewriter visitor classes to help you with such tasks.

When the input contains a severe syntax error, a ParserException is thrown. By catching it you can get details about the error. There are syntax errors though which can be tolerated by the parser. Such errors are ignored by default. You can record them by setting ParserOptions.ErrorHandler to an instance of CollectingErrorHandler. Alternatively, you can set ParserOptions.Tolerant to false to make the parser throw exceptions also in the case of tolerable syntax errors.

The library is able to write the AST (except for comments) back to JavaScript code:

var code = program.ToJavaScriptString(format: true);

It is also possible to serialize the AST into a JSON representation:

var astJson = program.ToJsonString(indent: "    ");

Considering the example above this call will return the following JSON:

{
    "type": "Program",
    "body": [
        {
            "type": "VariableDeclaration",
            "declarations": [
                {
                    "type": "VariableDeclarator",
                    "id": {
                        "type": "Identifier",
                        "name": "answer"
                    },
                    "init": {
                        "type": "Literal",
                        "value": 42,
                        "raw": "42"
                    }
                }
            ],
            "kind": "const"
        }
    ],
    "sourceType": "script",
    "strict": false
}

Benchmarks

Here is a list of common JavaScript libraries and the time it takes to parse them, compared to the time it took for the same script using the original Esprima in Chrome.

Script	Size	Esprima .NET (.NET 6)	Esprima (Chrome 116)
underscore-1.5.2	43 KB	1.0 ms	1.4 ms
backbone-1.1.0	59 KB	1.2 ms	1.6 ms
mootools-1.4.5	157 KB	5.2 ms	7.1 ms
jquery-1.9.1	262 KB	6.6 ms	7.9 ms
yui-3.12.0	330 KB	4.6 ms	6.9 ms
jquery.mobile-1.4.2	442 KB	10.0 ms	17.7 ms
angular-1.2.5	702 KB	8.5 ms	15.1 ms