apache / apache/datafusion-sqlparser-rs

Consistent AST encoding of parentheses to enable correct spans for function arguments, subqueries etc.

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Description

First off, I'm relatively new to both this codebase and Rust in general. But I thought it might be useful to start this topic anyway.

Epic: #1548

There are a bunch of places where **parentheses** can appear in SQL. Currently these are not handled consistently in the AST. This makes it difficult or impossible to attach Spans to all of them. @Nyrox who did much of the work introducing Spanned [mentioned](https://github.com/apache/datafusion-sqlparser-rs/issues/1563#issuecomment-2586942739) using AttachedToken to encode opening and closing parenthesis tokens in the AST. I think it would be good to come up with a standard way that can be applied to all of those nodes. Also it seems in many instances this might be a breaking change.

Attaching parentheses tokens to the AST is important for accurate spans: The span for the Function node `CALL(something)` should go all the way from `C` to `)`, not just `CALL` or even worse, `CALL(something`. Currently there's no way to encode this information.

On the other hand, parentheses are not semantically meaningful for the AST, so I don't want to needlessly complicate the structure.

One thing that's a bit vague to me is if the parentheses should be attached to the 'thing' itself or its container? E.g. there is Function -> FunctionArguments -> FunctionArgumentsList, to which of those do the parens belong? Similarly, Expr::InSubquery has a subquery field; do the parens belong to the subquery or to the InSubquery? (Reading Fmt::Display for Expr::InSubquery would imply the parens belong to it since it renders them and not the subquery which is just an Expr – but the subquery field could be a new Subquery type, which then would be able to render its own parens... 🤔)

To make matters even more complicated, some of these parentheses are optional (see `FunctionArguments` and also the somewhat related `OneOrManyWithParens`).

Here are some nodes that need to know about their parentheses (I might have missed some; to be systematic I'd probably go through every mention of LParen/RParen in the parser).

in ast/mod.rs
- Expr::Subquery
- Expr::InSubquery
- Expr::InUnnest
- Expr::Exists
- Expr::AllOp.right
- FunctionArguments
- FunctionArgumentList
- Statement::Execute.has_parentheses

in ast/query.rs
- Cte.closing_paren_token

Here's an initial idea: instead of adding `opening_paren_token` and `closing_paren_token` everywhere, how about creating a new struct `ParensPair { opening: AttachedToken, closing: AttachedToken }`? Or might we augment `OneOrManyWithParens` for this?

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

Research direction

Start by reviewing the listed nodes in ast/mod.rs and ast/query.rs, then trace every parser use of LParen and RParen as suggested in the issue. Compare how spans are currently formed and document a consistent representation and its compatibility impact; the issue has no settled design or acceptance criterion yet.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
rust, sql
Domain
compilers
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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