grep

Yes, there are already a couple of grep gems around - but they didn't do things the way I wanted, and weren't easy to fork. So here's mine.

Installation

To perform a system wide installation:

gem source -a http://gems.github.com
gem install JasonKing-grep

Just require it, it just reopens Dir and File and adds the grep instance method to each of them. You pass it a regular expression and it returns an array of hashes, very simple:

:match => Contains the MatchData object (so you can add parens and capture parts)
:file => Contains the File#path where the pattern matched (mainly useful for the Dir)
:lineno => Contains the line number where the pattern matched
:line => Contains the full line from the file where the pattern matched

That's it, I think that's the best grep you can have. Call it on a Dir object and it will drill down through the directory, matching as it goes. Call it on a File object and it will just match in that file.

Usage

require 'grep'
f = File.open('foo')
m = f.grep(/^\s*Include\s+(\S+)/)
m.first[:match][1]   # => captured parens expression

Contributors

• Jason King (JasonKing)