families

Groups a raw, possibly compound license string into its coarse family set — e.g. "GPL-3.0-or-later AND LGPL-3.0-or-later" yields {"gpl", "lgpl"}. Two sources reporting the same real license under different notation ("GPL3" vs "GPL-3.0-or-later", "GPL" vs "GPL2") yield the same family, so they read as agreeing rather than conflicting.

Proprietary/custom/unknown tokens all collapse to a single shared unknown-family sentinel rather than each becoming their own one-off family, so a batch of otherwise-identical "custom:<vendor>" strings don’t look like dozens of distinct disagreeing licenses. Use isKnown to check whether any real (non-sentinel) family was found.

Available since v3.1.2

Import

import { families } from '@helpers4/license';
// or, from the all-in-one package (same code, one install):
import { families } from 'helpers4/license';

Signature

families(raw: string): Set<string>

Parameters

Parameter	Type	Description
raw	string	A raw license string, single (`“MIT”`) or compound (`“GPL-3.0+ AND LGPL-3.0+”`)

Returns

Set<string> — The set of families found; empty only when raw has no tokens at all (e.g. an empty string)

Examples

Collapse notation drift into one family

“GPL3” and “GPL-3.0-or-later” are the same real license, reported differently by two sources.

families('GPL3')
// => Set(1) { 'gpl' }

Split a compound SPDX expression

“AND”/“OR” (any case) separate multiple license claims; “WITH” exception clauses are dropped.

families('GPL-3.0-or-later AND LGPL-3.0-or-later')
// => Set(2) { 'gpl', 'lgpl' }

Non-informative claims collapse to one shared “unknown” family

A batch of different custom: strings all read the same way — none of them is real evidence either way.

families('custom:Acme End User License')
// => Set(1) { 'unknown' }

Source

View source on GitHub