[Help Wanted] Transition from String to AST parsing.

[TheLarkInn]

From the latest few patch releases, it is becoming apparent that we should probably leverage AST parsing over Regex to provide these replacements.

Since I am 200% overbooked myself, I can't work on this myself atm. I would love for someone to take on this task. The existing tests should still be valid for passing, and maybe even a few more could be added.

Thank you everyone for contributing to issues and enhancements.

[Kefaise]

I found other bug with regexp approach. When we have comment after templateUrl, for example
templateUrl: './app.template.html' /*my awesome template*/
it cannot satisfy closing bracket or comma from regexp
var templateUrlRegex = /templateUrl\s*:(\s*['"`](.*?)['"`]\s*([,}]))/gm;
And it is not replaced.

[Riobe]

It looks like if we were doing javascript, then it would be relatively straightforward with esprima + escodegen, but I looked and didn't see equivalent tools for typescript.

Considering that every example of this parsing that you're testing for and supporting are in experimental decorators, I'd say a typescript is a reasonable assumption. Do you know of any tools that can take an AST parsing from the typescript language services and output code based on that? Even just the parsing looks much less straightforward...

[Riobe]

@Kefaise I believe my pull request #67 will handle your scenario as well. I just added a test case for it as well. I think @TheLarkInn is right that AST would likely be best, but this might still be helpful in the meantime.