Utilities for creation & injection of AST nodes

[cdaringe]

Problem

Many utilities are listed for search, filter, parse, etc, but I see none for creation and node injection.

Discussion

What approaches do you use? Plain old javascript?

I was hoping for something like insertAfter(root, target, u(...myNewNode)), akin to DOM APIs

I did consult the documentation site and various lists of utilities pre post :)

[ChristianMurphy]

Personally I tend to use unist-util-visit and unist-util-visit-parents the most, in both cases, mutating a node will modify the original AST.
For particularly complex node access, I may use unist-util-select to be able to leverage CSS-like selectors.

Another approach, specifically for building nodes is to use JSX syntax.
Which is built into xastscript and hastscript (in a yet to be released version). it can also be applied to other AST builders.

I was hoping for something like insertAfter(root, target, u(...myNewNode)), akin to DOM APIs

More DOM style APIs could be good contributions to unist/syntax-tree! Are you interested in creating some?
Some related ideas could include building out more React style APIs, expanding JSX support and maybe creating a ref like concept/util as another way to modify nodes.
Or building a jQuery-like API (which while it gets a lot of hate, inspired and helped bring modern APIs like querySelector)

[cdaringe]

I will never hate on jQuery :) It was the bee's knees! Until it wasn't!

Personally I tend to...

I needed to parse, <do async work>, then re-find and append. I found that it worked fine to just mutate and print w/ the md AST printer.

More DOM style APIs could be good contributions to unist/syntax-tree! Are you interested in creating some?

Maybe so! I've still evaluating this toolkit. I don't want to add libs for the sake of adding libs :). But if I continue to use it and am compelled, I'll be glad to send patches

[ChristianMurphy]

Async visitors are also supported, there is example how, here: syntax-tree/unist-util-visit-parents#8