zorn
Anyone have a regex to de-nest alaises in an Elixir code base?
My team is considering enabling the credo rule https://hexdocs.pm/credo/Credo.Check.Readability.MultiAlias.html that would force you to not nest aliases.
We have a lot of code like:
alias MyApp.{
Cat,
Dog,
Parrot
}
And I’m looking for an automated way to do a search and replace into something like:
alias MyApp.Cat
alias MyApp.Dog
alias MyApp.Parrot
I suspect this might be doable with regex but I have very little skills for that. Any chance someone here has that sitting around in a notebook somewhere or other suggestion?
PS: As to why we want to do this, it is to improve the grep-ability of the source. We want to have confidence when we search for MyApp.Dog we find those module references.
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al2o3cr
That kind of transformation is safer to do on AST (versus regexing code). The formatter provides some inspiration:
In between calls to Code.string_to_quoted_with_comments! and Code.Formatter.to_algebra, you could find alias nodes in the AST and transform them into the desired shape.
OR
You (could use the already-baked version included as a tutorial in the Sourceror docs! 
See also the release announcement thread:
mudasobwa
What would be wrong with using the aforementioned regex (assuming you have one) with grep leaving the code as-is for better readability?
grep -Pz '(?s)alias\s+(MyApp\.Dog|MyApp.{.*?,\s*Dog.*?})' $FILES
Just make the shell function to wrap this grep call, or even create an escript using Elixir regexes (the regex itself would be simpler, I believe.)
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