Question

I’m writing a Cocoa app for Leopard that, given a directory of text files, will scan through them, looking for a search pattern (let’s pretend they’re source files and I just want to find C comments). It will then present the results to the user.

While I think I could certainly do this with Cocoa, it feels like it’s really meant to be handed off to a scripting language. But which would be better for this task and why? I’m thinking with going with Ruby (I own a book on it, but I’ve never had a good reason to learn it too well), but I’m certainly open to others (Perl obviously springs to mind).

The kind of searching I’ll be doing isn’t too advanced, but I would like to integrate this into my Cocoa app one way or another.

How should I best approach this?

Answer 1

One braindead approach: fire off grep -l as an NSTask.

NSTask *task = [[NSTask alloc] init];
[task setLaunchPath: @'/bin/grep'];
NSArray *args = [NSArray arrayWithObjects: @'-I', @'-l', searchString, @'/path/to/textfiles', nil];
[task setArguments: args];
NSPipe *p = [NSPipe pipe];
[task setStandardOutput: p];
NSFileHandle *f = [pipe fileHandleForReading];
[task launch];

then open your file handle, read the contents, and do whatever you like with the results. -I searches only text files, -l hands back only the names of files that matched (each filename will only appear once).