Ethers.js: Tool for generating human-readable ABI

[glowkeeper]

Is there a tool in the _ethers.js_ ecosystem that takes a smart contract interface and returns a human-readable ABI? If not, it'd be cool if there was...

As an aside, I think there's a very small error with the docs explaining the human readable ABI:

let ABI = [
    "event Transfer(address from, address to, uint amount)",
    "function transfer(address to, uint amount)",
    "function symbol() returns (string)"
]

I _think_ that symbol() function should have this signature:

"function symbol() view returns (string)"

....otherwise, _ethers.js_ thinks that's a transaction and will try and charge you ether. _I think_ - forgive me if I'm wrong. However, if I'm not, that might be a bug, too ;)

[ricmoo]

You are absolutely right! I will fix that typo today.

The ethers-ts tool does that, and has a library to help too, but that’s still on my desktop. I’ll try to get it released tomorrow.

[glowkeeper]

You are absolutely right! I will fix that typo today.

Awesome!

The ethers-ts tool does that, and has a library to help too, but that’s still on my desktop. I’ll try to get it released tomorrow.

You are an absolute star :)

[ricmoo]

The documentation has been updated: https://docs.ethers.io/ethers.js/html/api-contract.html

[glowkeeper]

ps. I get _most of the way there_ using this quick bash script, which writes, in a format which I use in my frontend, the human readable ABI to STDOUT :

for FILE in $(ls [AO]*.sol)
do

  echo "$FILE\n"

  # print out struct tuple first
  awk '!/0$/{printf $0}/0$/' $FILE | sed 's/^.*\(struct[^}]*}\).*$/\1/g' | sed 's/struct[^{]*{ /tuple(/' | sed 's/ }/)/' | sed 's/;/,/g' | sed 's/, )/)/' | tr -s " " | sed 's/e( /e(/'

  echo "\n"

  # now turn events and functions into ethers.js human readable ABI form
  NAME=`echo $FILE | sed 's/\.sol//' | sed 's/^./\L&/'`
  echo "static ${NAME}ABI = ["
  egrep "event|function" $FILE | sed 's/^[ ]*\([e|f]\)/\1/' | sed s'/^\(.*\);$/\t"\1",/'
  echo "]\n"

done

I'm aware I could do better using other tools, but that was fun and fast to figure out ;)

[pcowgill]

@ricmoo Does the tool you mentioned generate human-readable ABIs from .sol files or from "regular" ABIs? Thanks!

[ricmoo]

I had one that could get "part" done by just the ABI, but the missing part is the contract name, which makes things more robust, and in V5 I will be pulling in structs too, which requires the solidity files.

It seems far more reliable to base it off the Solidity file, the other thing it does is provider a static factory method too, which includes the byte code, so the contract can be used to deploy contracts in a OO way...

I finished off some backlog of tasks I had today, so tomorrow I'll focus on getting the updated CLI tools out (as a beta). They will be a lot more powerful in V5, which I'm also hoping to get out for beta testing soon, since there are libraries to convert back and forth between human-readable and the JSON ABI formats.

[glowkeeper]

@ricmoo the dApp I'm currently working on uses a dozen or so smart contracts, and there are more coming. The dApp takes advantage of pragma experimental ABIEncoderV2 and its ability to _set_ and _get_ structs; handcrafting the necessary human-readable ABIs was getting a proper pain, so that little script above saves me hours!

Even so, the script's limited - it only outputs the last _struct_ it finds (I've tried different regex's for fixing that, but have failed to find anything that works, so far), so if a struct embeds another struct, I still have to handcraft that (i.e. tuple(byte32 _structVar, tuple(byte32 _otherStructVar) _otherstruct) _struct). It also fails to put the tuple stuff in its place in the function parameter, but that's a whole other level of complexity that I'm hoping you've solved ;)

[ricmoo]

I'm working on the tool right now. Hopefully I'll get beta.2 ready soon; which will still be on top of ethers v4, but I'll be adding the cli to v5 after this and porting it over, so it will be renamed to @ethersproject/cli.

I believe it will handle the case you are talking about, but it would be great to get your feedback. Let me get to it and update this ticket in a few hours.

Also, you should check out: https://www.npmjs.com/package/solidity-parser-antlr . It will allow you to do away with regex; I had so many regex in my first version, to the point where it was nearly a full lexer, and this package saved me a lot of time. :)

[ricmoo]

After diving into it again (it's been a while), I realize this version doesn't support structs... That was a reason I was waiting to move to v5 first, which has more libs for handling ABI. I've published it anyways, sans-abiv2, at npm install -g ethers-cli@next and then you can use ethers-ts generate contract.sol.

I'll start working on the v5 version right now with full struct support.

[glowkeeper]

How's this going?

[ricmoo]

The new version should work, no? Sorry this fell of my radar, but if it doesn’t work let me know and I’ll take a look into it. :)

[cocojoe]

@ricmoo are there any updates to generating Human Readable ABI from Solidity source files or is there a better way now todo this?

The package given in your guidance is deprecated and the recommended package @ethersproject/cli which doesn't appear to include this functionality.

Running generate with the ethers-cli@next package it doesn't respect the solidity compiler version specified in the .sol.

ParserError: Source file requires different compiler version (current compiler is 0.5.17+commit.d19bba13.Emscripten.clang - note that nightly builds are considered to be strictly less than the released version\n' +
      'pragma solidity ^0.7.3;\n' +

Thanks

[cocojoe]

In testing, a direct copy/paste of function worked fine, easily manageable by hand for a small interface at least.

[glowkeeper]

But that's the point - not-so-easily fashioned/managed by hand when your
app' gets beyond trivial...

I have a script that gets most of the way there...but a tool that did it
all would be awesome.

Steve

On Mon, 14 Dec 2020 at 20:24, Martin Walsh [e-mail] wrote:

In testing, a direct copy/paste of function worked fine, easily manageable
by hand for a small interface at least.

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