# 🛠️ Lua Parser Developer Guide
This guide is designed to help you quickly get started with developing and integrating `oak-lua`.
## 🚦 Quick Start
Add the dependency to your `Cargo.toml`:
```toml
[dependencies]
oak-lua = { path = "..." }
```
### Basic Parsing Example
The following is a standard workflow for parsing Lua scripts, including support for tables, functions, and control flow:
```rust
use oak_lua::{LuaParser, SourceText, LuaLanguage};
fn main() {
// 1. Prepare source code
let code = r#"
local function greet(name)
local message = "Hello, " .. name
print(message)
end
local user = {
name = "Oak",
age = 1
}
greet(user.name)
"#;
let source = SourceText::new(code);
// 2. Initialize parser
let config = LuaLanguage::new();
let parser = LuaParser::new(&config);
// 3. Execute parsing
let result = parser.parse(&source);
// 4. Handle results
if result.is_success() {
println!("Parsing successful! AST node count: {}", result.node_count());
} else {
eprintln!("Errors found during parsing.");
for diag in result.diagnostics() {
println!("[{}:{}] {}", diag.line, diag.column, diag.message);
}
}
}
```
## 🔍 Core API Usage
### 1. Syntax Tree Traversal
After a successful parse, you can use the built-in visitor pattern or manually traverse the Green/Red Tree to extract Lua specific constructs like function definitions, table constructors, local variable declarations, and loops.
### 2. Incremental Parsing
Lua scripts can grow large in game development. `oak-lua` supports sub-millisecond incremental updates:
```rust
// Re-parse only the modified section
let new_result = parser.reparse(&new_source, &old_result);
```
### 3. Error Recovery
The parser is designed for industrial-grade fault tolerance, recovering gracefully from missing `end` keywords or malformed table syntax to provide continuous feedback in IDEs.
## 🏗️ Architecture Overview
- **Lexer**: Tokenizes Lua source text, supporting Lua-specific long strings (`[[ ... ]]`), long comments, and numeric literals.
- **Parser**: A high-performance recursive descent parser with Pratt parsing for expressions, handling Lua's operator precedence and table constructors.
- **AST**: A strongly-typed, lossless syntax tree that preserves all trivia (comments/whitespace) for refactoring and formatting tools.
## 🔗 Advanced Resources
- **Full Examples**: Check the [examples/](examples/) folder in the project root.
- **API Documentation**: Run `cargo doc --open` for detailed type definitions.
- **Test Cases**: See [tests/readme.md](tests/readme.md) for details on our snapshot-based testing.