Hands-On Software Engineering with Golang

Using tools to analyze and manipulate Go programs

Go programs are inherently easy to parse. In fact, the Go library provides built-in packages that can parse Go programs into abstract syntax trees (ASTs), which can be traversed, modified, and transformed back into Go code. Let's go through a simple example to show you how easy it is to work with these packages.

First, we need a helper function to convert a Go program into an AST representation. The following parse function does exactly that:

import (
    "fmt"
    "go/ast"
    "go/parser"
    "go/token"
)

// parse a Go program into an AST representation.
func parse(program string) (*token.FileSet, *ast.File, error) {
    fs := token.NewFileSet()
    tree, err := parser.ParseFile(fs, "example.go", program, 0)