Structured Search

[gabriel-weaver]

Some practitioners were interested in Context-Free Grep to do a structured code search (where it is block defined). For example, "what's in the struct?" or queries based on timestamps.

[gabriel-weaver]

A slash dotter stated the following: "Context-Free Grep/Diff can be used to search for data/changes in arbitrary non-line-record-based files. Such as XML, HTML, JSON, SQLite databases, other databases, Apache configs, and many other pieces of data. Heck, even most programming languages are not line-based, but statement terminated/separated. Imagine being able to grep for a function name, and getting its entire prototype/usage even when it spans multiple lines (very common in standard glib headers). And, depending on the plugin's capabilities, you could grep for a function name as a function name and not get back any usage of that text as a variable or embedded in a string, or a comment (skip commented-out calls!). If there's sufficient configurability, you could ask for the entire block that the given text is in, and such a grep would be able to display everything in the corresponding...Makes grep that much valuable. So my question is, why aren't more IT-heavy corporations/government departments not involved?"

[gabriel-weaver]

Another slashdotter stated: "If you have structured data (say XML), you could target hierarchies like "config-root:server-name:name". That way, if the text inside name is only being looked for in that one field, you won't hit a bunch of other stuff that also happen to be similar strings but are unrelated."