Factorio Forums

Any chance that the devs can provide JSON structured variants of the lua API doc?
i.e. the current api documentation is at:
https://lua-api.factorio.com/${VERSION}/${OBJECT}.html
let's have a machine friendly version at:
https://lua-api.factorio.com/${VERSION}/${OBJECT}.json

Main advantage is that it would make it much easier to feed the latest API into a your favorite editor extension.

The current docs system directly generates html so there's no simple "output it as JSON instead". If one of the other devs want to write that logic they can but until then this isn't going to happen.

Has anything changed on that topic or has anyone written an html parser for this?

Do you have an example of the exact format you'd like? E.g. some that is already well supported by editors.

Sanqui wrote: ↑

Tue Oct 22, 2019 2:42 pm

Do you have an example of the exact format you'd like? E.g. some that is already well supported by editors.

This perhaps: https://github.com/simonvizzini/vscode- ... aster/data

I think this makes a lot of sense and I could do it sometime, so I'll move this to the normal forum

(Sorry for the late answer)

Sanqui wrote: ↑

Tue Oct 22, 2019 2:42 pm

Do you have an example of the exact format you'd like? E.g. some that is already well supported by editors.

No i don't have any particular format requirement beyond "easily parsable". I thought about including it in an extension of my "/sudo" mod for which i'd have to reparse it anyway. As the engine supports lua and json easily, either of both would be mighty fine. I use Notepad++ as an editor but it uses xml for auto-completition hints, so i'd rather generate that xml myself from a simpler format.

Sanqui wrote: ↑

Tue Oct 22, 2019 2:54 pm

I think this makes a lot of sense and I could do it sometime, so I'll move this to the normal forum

Awesome! That VScode json format linked by @Bilka looks reasonably easy to parse. And VScode is pretty popular too.

This is a thing now!

That is great! Unfortunately not retroactive, but awesome fo the future.
Can we have such a json output for prototype definitions as well (even though they are only in the wiki and mostly manually updated)?

asdff45 wrote: ↑

Fri Aug 20, 2021 4:25 pm

Can we have such a json output for prototype definitions as well (even though they are only in the wiki and mostly manually updated)?

I would still love this even if it's a link on the wiki page "download json" and can't be packaged with normal releases (update cycles etc).

asdff45 wrote: ↑

Fri Aug 20, 2021 4:25 pm

That is great! Unfortunately not retroactive, but awesome fo the future.
Can we have such a json output for prototype definitions as well (even though they are only in the wiki and mostly manually updated)?

I'd have liked to make it work retroactively, but unfortunately getting this to work well required extensive adjustments of large parts of the documentation, which the old releases won't have, so their docs would be much less functional.

Regarding your second point, who knows what the future brings.

Side thing; what reason would anyone have for wanting old versions of the Lua API in machine readable format?

I had that available for my intellij plugin, but i can just drop support for those old verions. I don't think people are still developing for them.