tree-grepper

https://github.com/BrianHicks/tree-grepper

uses tree-sitter to parse source code into ASTs and allow you to grep it via queries.

explanatory blog post: https://bytes.zone/posts/tree-grepper/

The example given in that post is, "build an import graph for my source code", a task I've previously accomplished with jq or terrible regexes. In that particular case, I relied on package.json exactly because it's easily parseable; but perhaps it would have been better to rely on a tool that parsed the source instead.

Unfortunately, the tool doesn't have any releases yet and requires nix to build, so I'm not willing to go quite that far, so I can't play with it.

See also ast-grep