The linter fails badly on incomplete control comments

[lelit]

I use JSL with Emacs flymake, and when you start writing a control comment and the check is triggered before the comment is complete, the linter exits with a traceback:

  File ".../javascriptlint/lint.py", line 73, in _parse_control_comment
    keyword = control_comment.lower().split()[0]
IndexError: list index out of range

and thus the flymake-mode gets turned off.

I fixed the issue in my own branch of the tool: since it's under darcs VC, it's not easy for me to provide a git patch, moreover you dropped the test suite so my patch would not apply cleanly.

Anyway, I basically rewrote the _parse_control_comment() in lint.py:

def _parse_control_comment(comment):
    """ Returns None or (keyword, parms) """
    atom = comment.atom.strip()
    if atom.lower().startswith('jsl:'):
        control_comment = atom[4:]
    elif atom.startswith('@') and atom.endswith('@'):
        control_comment = atom[1:-1]
    else:
        return None

    control_comment_lower = control_comment.lower()
    for keyword in ('ignoreall',
                    'ignore',
                    'end',
                    'option explicit',
                    'import',
                    'fallthru',
                    'pass',
                    'declare',
                    'unused',
                    'content-type'):
        if control_comment_lower.startswith(keyword):
            break
    else:
        return None

    parms = control_comment[len(keyword):].strip()
    return (comment, keyword, parms)

As you can see, I also chose a different way of recognizing the "keyword", since the upstream way of using a split() and checking the presence in a dictionary seemed weak to me, given the existence of "option explicit" that contains a space...

For the curious, my branch can be fetched with

darcs get http://darcs.metapensiero.it/our/lele/javascriptlint

[davepacheco]

Thanks for the heads-up, and especially the detailed explanation. I don't tend to run into this because I don't check code interactively, but I'd be happy to incorporate these changes if someone else using this branch is hitting the issue. (I may get to it anyway, but I've got a lot on my plate at the moment.)