I've noticed several tools (like autocompletes for various IDEs) that rely on scraping the documentation of the Lua API and prototypes pages and then do all sorts of html scraping magic to extract things like structures, methods, types, descriptions, etc. As with any scraping solution, this is brittle and imperfect. For example, I've noticed in at least one autocomplete plugin that some of the descriptions are mangled or just not present.
I'm working on a project that requires the same sort of information about the API, so I'm about to write my own parser for this information
I'm assuming that the documentation is generated from the raw type information extracted from the codebase, as opposed to the html files being edited by hand. If that's the case, would it be possible to bundle/post the raw information as well as the human readable api docs? Then programs like autocompletes could parse the definition files directly and skip all of the web scraping.
I'm not asking for any specific format, just something amenable to being read by code.
This would require that the doc is already updated to the newest version when that version is released. That is rather far from reality; the doc updates take me somewhere from a few weeks to a few months per major version.
