cvnb / comby

A tool for structural code search and replace that supports ~every language.

comby

See the usage documentation.

A short example below shows how comby simplifies matching and rewriting compared to regex approaches like sed.

Comby supports interactive review mode (click here to see it in action).

Need help writing patterns or have other problems? Post them in Gitter.

Install (pre-built binaries)

Mac OS X

• brew install comby

Ubuntu Linux

• bash <(curl -sL get.comby.dev)

• Arch and other Linux: The PCRE library is dynamically linked in the Ubuntu binary. For other distributions, like Arch, a fixup is needed: ln -s /usr/lib/libpcre.so /usr/lib/libpcre.so.3. Alternatively, consider building from source.

Windows

• Install the Windows Subsystem for Linux and install Ubuntu. Then run bash <(curl -sL get.comby.dev)

Docker

• docker pull comby/comby

click to expand an example invocation for the docker image

Running with docker on stdin:

docker run -a stdin -a stdout -a stderr -i comby/comby '(:[emoji] hi)' 'bye :[emoji]' lisp -stdin <<< '(👋 hi)'

Or try it live.

Isn't a regex approach like sed good enough?

Sometimes, yes. But often, small changes and refactorings are complicated by nested expressions, comments, or strings. Consider the following C-like snippet. Say the challenge is to rewrite the two if conditions to the value 1. Can you write a regular expression that matches the contents of the two if condition expressions, and only those two? Feel free to share your pattern with @rvtond on Twitter.

if (fgets(line, 128, file_pointer) == Null) // 1) if (...) returns 0
      return 0;
...
if (scanf("%d) %d", &x, &y) == 2) // 2) if (scanf("%d) %d", &x, &y) == 2) returns 0
      return 0; 

To match these with comby, all you need to write is if (:[condition]), and specify one flag that this language is C-like. The replacement is if (1). See the live example.

Build from source

• Install opam

• Create a new switch if you don't have OCaml installed:

opam init
opam switch create 4.09.0 4.09.0

• Install OS dependencies:

  • Linux: sudo apt-get install pkg-config libpcre3-dev

  • Mac: brew install pkg-config pcre

• Then install the library dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/comby-tools/comby
cd comby && opam install . --deps-only -y

• Build and test

make
make test

• If you want to install comby on your PATH, run

make install