Find In Files Using Ruby Or Python

A popular text editor has the following 'find in files' feature that opens in a dialog box: Look For: __searchtext__ File Filter: *.txt; *.htm Start From: c:/docs/2

Solution 1:

I know you said you don't feel like writing it yourself, but for what it's worth, it would be very easy using os.walk - you could do something like this:

results = []
if regex_search:
    p = re.compile(__searchtext__)
fordir, subdirs, subfiles in os.walk('c:/docs/2009'):
    for name in fnmatch.filter(subfiles, '*.txt'):
        fn = os.path.join(dir, name)
        withopen(fn, 'r') as f:
            if regex_search:
                results += [(fn,lineno) for lineno, line inenumerate(f) if p.search(line)]
            else:
                results += [(fn,lineno) for lineno, line inenumerate(f) if line.find(__searchtext__) >= 0]

(that's Python, btw)

Solution 2:

Grepper is a Ruby gem by David A. Black for doing exactly that:

g = Grepper.new
g.files = %w{ one.txt two.txt three.txt }
g.options = %w{ B2 }   # two lines of before-context
g.pattern = /__search_string__/
g.run

g.results.each do |file, result|
  result.matches.each do |lineno, before, line, after|
    etc....

I believe it shells out to grep and wraps the results in Ruby objects, which means it takes the same options as grep. Install with:

sudo gem install grepper