Warning: another programming entry. There's an old saying, build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.
This programmer currently finds himself in need of a better mousetrap -- specificaly, a way to search for text. I'm talking about an intelligent grep that's aware of language syntax, so that I could search for text while ignoring comments in files. Or search for all occurances of a variable name, but only amongst variable names, rather than amongst all text in a file in general.
Someone's had to come up with something like that -- any decent editor will have syntax coloring of source code, so it should be a small incremental feat to be able to search text that's eg: a variable name, a constant string, not a comment.
But no one on the team seems to have heard of such a beast, and googling didn't help much, but then again, I didn't really know how to phrase the query without being too broad.
So, anyone that comes up with such a tool will probably win the hearts of millions of frustrated programmers all over the world, this one included.
Anyone?
Comments (2)
Oh I've seen stuff like that out there... I think Unix tools w/ SED/AWK or maybe PERL... it parses out your comments and then applies the grep. Does emacs have something to hide comments while viewing? Then you can just search too.
"M Wang, M Wang... oh he moves, he moves!" =)
Posted by collinlee | April 17, 2004 6:00 AM
Posted on April 17, 2004 06:00
thanks for reply, didn't catch your link at markwang.com -- when I went over recently, website was down.. with 300+ blogs to keep up with, I don't make my rounds too regularly, a la daily.. I use www.barronhosting.com, maybe not as much space as your previous host, but works fairly well 99%+ uptime, and low cost..
Posted by djchuang | April 25, 2004 11:07 PM
Posted on April 25, 2004 23:07