Is there any to make ClangTool retain the comment in AST after preprocessing?

Beginners
#1

I am trying to parse comment in my source code. Here is a simple example code of my input.

int main() {
  foo(); // [my-tag] tag_A, tag_B
  return 0;
}

I would like my tool to parse the string after [my-tag] in comment which is “tag_A, tag_B” out in this example. After reading the tutorial in the documentation, I mimic the matcher and attempt to access the comment node in ASTContext. However, I always get true from ASTContext.Comments.empty(). I doubt the issue comes from the comment parsing flags. According to the clang user manual, clang suppose to retain the comments after I specifying one of these three.

  • -Wdocumentation
  • -fparse-all-comments
  • -fcomment-block-commands

But none of these three will make the empty() return false. I try to alter the preprocessing behavior by adding -E -CC. Yet it also makes preprocessor ignore the comments. I attach my compile_commands.json and how I check if the comment node appears in the ASTContext below.

// compile_commands.json
[
  {
    "directory": "/home/my/project/target/directory",
    "arguments": ["/usr/local/bin/clang", "-c", "-std=c++14", "-Qunused-arguments", "-m64", "-fparse-all-comments", "-I/usr/include", "-I/usr/local/lib/clang/10.0.0/include", "-o", "build/.objs/input/linux/x86_64/release/target/target.cpp.o", "target/target.cpp"],
    "file": "target/target.cpp"
  }
]

// CommentParser.cpp
class MyPrinter : public MatchFinder::MatchCallback {
  public:
    virtual void run(const MatchFinder::MatchResult &Result) {
      ASTContext *Context = Result.Context;
      SourceManager& sm = Context->getSourceManager();
      if (!Context->Comments.empty()) // I check the comment node here.
        llvm::outs() << "There is no parsed comment\n";
    }
};

int main(int argc, const char **argv) {
  // CommonOptionsParser OptionsParser(argc, argv, MyToolCategory);
  std::string err;
  std::unique_ptr<CompilationDatabase> cd = CompilationDatabase::autoDetectFromSource("/home/my/project/target/directory/compile_commands.json", err);

  ClangTool Tool(*cd, cd->getAllFiles());

  MyPrinter Printer;
  MatchFinder Finder;

  StatementMatcher functionMatcher =
    callExpr(callee(functionDecl(hasName("pthread_mutex_lock")))).bind("functions");

  Finder.addMatcher(functionMatcher, &Printer);

  return Tool.run(newFrontendActionFactory(&Finder).get());

I even try tp setPreprocessorOutputOpts explicitly by manually constructing CompilerInstance and CompilerInvocation. However I don’t get what I want. Btw, I even can’t see the comment appear when I use clang-check -ast-dump input.c --extra-arg=-fparse-all-comments

In a word, I wonder if there is a simple way to make ASTContext retain the comment information.