feature request - Regular Expressions

[Martin.Fusek]

I want Regular Expressions for searching files and text in files.

[djk]

I want Regular Expressions for searching files and text in files.

Use "Search".
Christian Ghisler (author) wrote:

I can tell you: TC 6.0 will support regular expressions as an option! It already works in search, multi-rename tool and select/unselect files. However, it will not be supported for text searches yet.

http://www.ghisler.ch/board/viewtopic.php?p=8126#8126

[Valentino]

Thanks djk!

Christian, I want regular expressions to search files!

(joke, can't resist, voices control me...)

[ghisler(Author)]

The problem is that the RegEx library needs the text to be searched to be in memory. This means that a regular expression couldn't stretch over a whole file. But I cannot simply pass blocks of, say, 64k to the function, with an overlap of 1k, because this way the RegEx function may find some matches larger than 1k, and miss some others. Any ideas?

[Jonas]

Probably you could push this problem to the user.... so that the user can say (for each search; setting saved in .ini) how large the blocks and the lapping should be....

And it would be nice if the search-Dialog would not block the main window!

[shammat]

The problem is that the RegEx library needs the text to be searched to be in memory. [...] Any ideas?

How does grep solve this problem?
I'm not sure, but I don't think that command line tools like grep load the whole file into memory. So there should be a solution. There is a gnu version of grep around so you could have a look at the source code....

[Black Dog]

[face=courier]On 20-06-2003 18:55:10 +0000 ghisler(Author) wrote:

g> Any ideas?

Mapped file

CreateFileMapping
FlushViewOfFile
MapViewOfFile
MapViewOfFileEx
OpenFileMapping
UnmapViewOfFile[/face]

[ghisler(Author)]

Sorry, I cannot use mapped files with this library - it expects Delphi strings with length. But zero terminated strings wouldn't work either with binary files...

[fabiochelly]

Sorry, I cannot use mapped files with this library - it expects Delphi strings with length. But zero terminated strings wouldn't work either with binary files...

Did you try Systools RegEx component, is is open sources now and it works fine

[ghisler(Author)]

Systools costs $300. But the price isn't the problem - I don't want to use any proprietary code in my program, there would be a danger of publishing code (e.g. in plugins) which belongs to someone else by mistake. I don't want to risk this.

[Lucas_C]

Have you considered the following option: using an open source C-based regex library (such as PCRE, http://pcre.sourceforge.net/), and wrapping the functionality you need in a DLL (written in C), callable from your Delphi code? Or do you want to keep TC a monolithic executable as far as possible?

[WatchUer]

Have you considered the following option: using an open source C-based regex library (such as PCRE, http://pcre.sourceforge.net/), and wrapping the functionality you need in a DLL (written in C), callable from your Delphi code? Or do you want to keep TC a monolithic executable as far as possible?

Why not a monolithic executable? I dont't like a program with so many dlls reside here and there.

[Thany]

How exactly does TC support regular expressions? When I do enter a simple expression like this:

Code: Select all

[a-z]{4}[0-9]{2}[a-z][0-9]{3}\.jpg

It returns no files, while in the folder I'm searching there a re tons of files that fullfill this expression, like
asam03a013.jpg
dian01a067.jpg

And I could find *anything* about regexes in the helpfile... so what's cooking?

[djk]

TC is going to support regular expressions in 6.0 version. So you have to wait a moment

[Thany]

Sorry, guess I misunderstood...

It already works in search, multi-rename tool and select/unselect files.

This sounds like it already works, IOW in TC 5.51... Too bad I'm wrong. Looking forward to 6.0 though