Could prettier be used to print from an AST?

I really like how prettier handles code wrapping and I’m experimenting with using it to print ASTs constructed with babel-types and ast-types (jscodeshift).

However, differentiating from recast, prettier’s printing algorithm now relies on the .raw values of literals (https://github.com/jlongster/prettier/blob/6e68f7495fba705c4d1e58e63efb5a41dea2df7d/src/printer.js#L714-L723), which makes it unable to print a programmatically constructed AST literal node.

Is reading from the .raw field necessary for properly handling unicode characters? If I understand it correctly, would you be interested in a PR that let prettier check and fallback to use/cast the .value field when .raw does not present on a node? 😃

[TheLarkInn]

Holy crap, its beautiful.

I think there are some specific nuances with spacing and indent we’ll look into but it looks like I can pass recast and pretty options that seem pretty similar.

[vjeux]

By the way, we also read from the original source in order to figure out if there are new lines for comments and preserve empty lines. You want to make sure that the location of the original source is preserved otherwise it’s going to look completely broken.