pfff is a set of tools and APIs to perform static analysis, code visualizations, code navigations, or style-preserving source-to-source transformations such as refactorings on source code. There is good support for Javascript, Python, C, Java, Go, and PHP. There is also preliminary support for other languages such as C++, Ruby, Rust, C#, Html, CSS, Erlang, Lisp, Haskell, Skip, and SQL. There is also very good support for OCaml code so that the framework can be used on the code of pfff itself.

For each languages there are mainly 2 libraries, for instance parsing_php.cma and analysis_php.cma, that you can embed in your own application if you need to process PHP code. See the demos/ directory for example of use of the pfff API. See also docs/manual/Parsing_xxx.pdf and docs/manual/Analyzis_xxx.pdf for more documentation on how to use or extend pfff.

pfff is also made of few tools:

• pfff, which allows to test the different parsers on a single file
• scheck, a bug finder
• stags, an Emacs tag generator
• sgrep, a syntactical grep
• spatch, a syntactical patch
• codequery, an interactive tool a la SQL to query information about the structure of a codebase using Prolog as the query engine
• pfff_db, which does some global analysis on a set of source files and store the data in a marshalled form in a file somewhere (e.g. /tmp/db.json)

A few pfff-related tools are now in their own repositories:

• sgrep and spatch, a bug-finder and refactoring tool
• codemap, which is a gtk and cairo based source code visualizer/navigator/searcher leveraging the information computed by pfff_db and codegraph_build
• codegraph_build, a source code indexer
• codegraph, a package/module/class dependency visualizer leveraging the information computed previously by codegraph_build

For more information, look at the pfff wiki here: http://github.com/returntocorp/pfff/wiki/Main as well as the docs/manual/ directory.

$ pfff -parse_php demos/foo.php

or

$ pfff -dump_php demos/foo.php

You can also look at pfff --help

$ ./pfff_db -lang ml -o /tmp/pfff.json ~/pfff

to analyze all the .ml and .mli files under ~/pfff and store metadata information (the database) in /tmp/pfff.json

1. In commons/file_type.ml, add your language under the appropriate programming language type in type file_type and add in matching to the file extension of your language in file_type_of_file2
2. In commons/file_type.mli, add you language under the appropriate programming language type in type file_type
3. In lang_GENERIC/parsing/Lang.ml, add your language and necessary code in
   • type t
   • list_of_lang
   • langs_of_filename
   • string_of_lang
   • ext_of_lang
4. In lang_GENERIC/parsing/Lang.mli, add your language in type t.
5. In lang_GENERIC/parsing/Parse_generic.ml, add you language and necessary code into:
   • parse_pattern
   • parse_with_lang

Look at the pfff wiki here: http://github.com/returntocorp/pfff/wiki/Main