Question

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/2009
 Report:         [ ] Filenames [ ]FileCount only
 Method:         [ ] Regex     [ ]Plain Text

In fact, several popular text editors have this.

I would like to do the same thing but using a python or ruby class instead of a text editor.
That way, this same kind of brain-dead simple operation can be run from a script on any platform that supports ruby or python.

Question: I don’t feel like writing this myself, so does anyone know of a ruby or python script that accepts the same or similar easy input args and does what you’d expect?

I am looking for something that does a brute-force linear search, nothing to do with indexed searches.

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

(that’s Python, btw)