CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#parsing
stackPusher
stackPusher

Reputation: 6512

Parsing C Header Files in C#

I'm working with Visual Studio C#, and I need to parse C header files to extract information only about the function declarations contained within. For each function I need the name, return type, and its parameters. If possible, I'd like the parameters in the order in which they appear in the function declaration. I've seen stuff online about using visual studios tags, or Exhuberant Ctags, etc. But from what I gathered those aren't really options that let me perform the parse from my C# program with C# code (I may be mistaken?). I've also looked through all the other answers to related questions but they don't seem really apply to my situation (I may just be dumb). If I could at least get all the lines of code that represent function declarations I'd have a good start and could hand-parse the rest myself. Thanks in advance

Upvotes: 2

Views: 3468

Answers (1)

Ira Baxter
Ira Baxter

Reputation: 95430

To "parse" C (header) files in a deep sense and pick up the type information for function declarations, in practice you need:

  • a full preprocessor (including the pecaddillos added by the vendor, MS has some pretty odd stuff in their headers),
  • a full (syntax) parser/AST builder for the C dialect of interest (there's no such thing as "C"; there is what the vendor offers in this revision of the compiler)
  • a full symbol table construction (because typedefs are aliases for the actual types of interest)

Many people will suggest "write your own parser (for C)". Mostly those people haven't done this; its a lot more work to do this and get it right than they understand. If you don't start with a production-level machinery, you won't get through real C header files without fixing it all.

Just parsing plain C is hard; consider the problem of parsing the ambiguous phrase

 T*X;

A classic parser cannot parse this without additional hackery.

You will also not be able to parse a C header file by itself, in general. You need to have the source code context (often including the compiler command line) in which it is included, or typedefs, preprocessor conditionals and macros in a specific header file will be undefined and therefore unexpandable into the valid C that the compiler normally sees.

You are better off getting pre-existing pre-tested machinery that will do this for you. Clang comes to mind as an option, although I'm not sure it handles the MS header files. GCC is kind of an option, but it really, really wants to be a compiler, not your local friendly C source code analysis tool, and again I'm unsure of its support for MS dialects of C. Our DMS Software Reengineering Toolkit has all of the above for various MS dialects of C.

Having chosen a tool that can actually parse such headers, you'll likely want to do something with the collected header information. You are vague about what you want to accomplish. Having mentioned C# and C in the same breath, there's a hint that you want to call C programs from C# code, and thus need to generate C# equivalent APIs for the C code. For this you will need machinery to manipulate the type information provided, and to build the "text" for the C# declarations. For this, you are likely to find that you need other supporting tooling to do that part, too. Here GCC is a complete non-starter; it will offer you no additional help. Clang and DMS are both designed to be libraries of custom-tool building machinery.

Of course, this may all be moot depending on how much header file text you want to handle; it if is just one header file, doing it manually is probably easiest. You suggest you are willing to do that ("could hand-parse..."). In that case, all you really need to do is to run the preprocessor and interpret the output. I beleive you can do with command line switches for GCC and Clang and even the MS compilers; I know DMS can do this. For easily avialable options here, see How do I see a C/C++ source file after preprocessing in Visual Studio?

Upvotes: 5

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