clj-metasearch

Helper functions for searching through Clojure namespaces for Vars containing specific bits of metadata.

Usage

Finding Clojure Vars is fairly simple.

(use 'clj-metasearch.core)

(find-vars #(= (:name %) 'pprint))
=> ((var clojure.pprint/pprint))

find-vars takes a predicate which will be run on the metadata for each Var being checked.

We can get the value of Vars we find by using var-get and then begin using the value right away. For example:

(let [println-fn (-> (find-vars #(= (:name %) 'println))
                     (first)
                     (var-get))]
  (println-fn "Hello world!"))
Hello world!
=> nil

By default find-vars will search all Clojure namespaces it can find in the current classpath. We can filter which Clojure namespaces are checked by supplying an additional predicate to find-vars under the :namespace-pred argument. This predicate will be run on each namespace found (the namespace will be passed as a symbol to the predicate).

; no namespace filtering. all namespaces are checked
(find-vars #(= (:name %) 'find-namespaces))
=> ((var clj-metasearch.core/find-namespaces)
    (var clojure.tools.namespace.find/find-namespaces))

; using namespace filtering
(find-vars
  #(= (:name %) 'find-namespaces)
  :namespace-pred #(not= % 'clj-metasearch.core))
=> ((var clojure.tools.namespace.find/find-namespaces))

By default, to help avoid loading a bunch of libraries the first time find-vars is called namespaces are not automatically loaded before being checked. Thusly, you will only be able to find Vars in namespaces that are currently loaded.

find-vars accepts an option, :require-all-namespaces?, that allows you to change this behaviour. Passing true will cause each namespace being checked to first be loaded via require.

(find-vars #(= (:name %) 'parse))
=> ()

(find-vars
  #(= (:name %) 'parse)
  :require-all-namespaces? true)
=> ((var clojure.xml/parse))

When you use true for :require-all-namespaces?, it would normally be a good idea to supply a namespace predicate via :namespace-pred if at all possible to avoid unnecessarily loading a whole bunch of extra namespaces.

Exceptions

By default find-vars suppresses any exceptions encountered while it searches through namespaces (including any exceptions that might occur when loading new namespaces when :require-all-namespaces? is set). This can be helpful, but sometimes it might be useful to know why something you might have been expecting to find doesn't get returned by find-vars.

We can turn off exception suppression by using either the throw-exceptions? option or the throw-compiler-exceptions? option in calls to find-vars. Setting throw-exceptions? to true will not suppress any exceptions that are encountered, while setting throw-compiler-exceptions? to true will suppress all exceptions except for clojure.lang.Compiler.CompilerException exceptions. This option can be useful to catch any syntax or other errors in your own code.

License

Distributed under the the MIT License. See LICENSE for more details.