ast-comments

An extension to the built-in ast module. Finds comments in source code and adds them to the parsed tree.

Installation

pip install ast-comments

Usage

There is no difference in usage between ast and ast-comments

>>> from ast_comments import *
>>> tree = parse("hello = 'hello' # comment to hello")

Parsed tree is an instance of the original ast.Module object. The only difference is that there is a new type of tree node: Comment

>>> tree
<_ast.Module object at 0x7ffba52322e0>
>>> tree.body
[<ast.Assign object at 0x10a01d5b0>, <ast_comments.Comment object at 0x10a09e0a0>]
>>> tree.body[1].value
'# comment to hello'
>>> dump(tree)
"Module(body=[Assign(targets=[Name(id='hello', ctx=Store())], value=Constant(value='hello')), Comment(value='# comment to hello', inline=True)], type_ignores=[])"

If you have python3.9 or above it's also possible to unparse the tree object with its comments preserved.

>>> print(unparse(tree))
hello = 'hello'  # comment to hello

Note: Python compile() cannot be run on the tree output from parse. The included pre_compile_fixer() function can be used to fix the tree (stripping comment nodes) if it will be necessary to compile the output.

More examples can be found in test_parse.py and test_unparse.py.