Question

I need to associate textual data with the lines in a source code file. Something like “these lines are to create a Myclass object” -> lines from 20 to 32.

The problem is that this kind of line tracking is highly fragile: it is sufficient that someone adds a newline to break my correspondence between associated text and lines.

I need an idea to make this link a bit stronger (not too much but at least resisting to a few line shifts), suggestions are greatly welcome.

Answer 1

An easy solution would be to hash (md5 is pretty easy and accessible) the lines and store the hash along the data.

You can then check the hash against the possibly modified file. If it matches, great, otherwise begin checking previous/next lines for a match.