JavaScript Parser and Analyzer in C# .NET 4.5

Question

Not sure if the title explains it correctly.

Anyways, I'm building a .NET WPF application which should go through the JavaScript and identify issues such as

1. If the variables defined are being nullified at the end
2. If try/catch/finally blocks are being used.
3. Function calls

I went through the questions over here which were all revolving around c/c++. Now I regret bunking my compilers classes.

I wanted to know how to verify points 1-3 in C#. Any library out there which does this?

Answer 1

What you're looking for is an abstract syntax tree parser for Javascript written in C#.

There are a few choices I know of:

Microsoft's Ajax Minifier library comes with its own AST parser (used to minify / optimize Javascript files). You can find the source code for that on GitHub.

Esprima.net is another option. It's a port of the popular Javascript library Esprima.

The good thing about Esprima is it outputs the AST in a common format (defined by Mozilla here) that's used across a few parsers, making it really easy to port utilities for walking the tree, etc. since they all use the same underlying data structure.