Esprima (esprima.org, BSD license) is a high performance,
standard-compliant ECMAScript
parser written in ECMAScript (also popularly known as
JavaScript).
Esprima is created and maintained by Ariya Hidayat,
with the help of many contributors.

Features

• Full support for ECMAScript 2016 (ECMA-262 7th Edition)
• Sensible syntax tree format as standardized by ESTree project
• Experimental support for JSX, a syntax extension for React
• Optional tracking of syntax node location (index-based and line-column)
• Heavily tested (~1300 unit tests with full code coverage)

API

Esprima can be used to perform lexical analysis (tokenization) or syntactic analysis (parsing) of a JavaScript program.

A simple example on Node.js REPL:

> var esprima = require('esprima');
> var program = 'const answer = 42';

> esprima.tokenize(program);
[ { type: 'Keyword', value: 'const' },
  { type: 'Identifier', value: 'answer' },
  { type: 'Punctuator', value: '=' },
  { type: 'Numeric', value: '42' } ]

> esprima.parse(program);
{ type: 'Program',
  body:
   [ { type: 'VariableDeclaration',
       declarations: [Object],
       kind: 'const' } ],
  sourceType: 'script' }