search inside the .p .w and .i files possible?

Hello me again.. I have a huge project and was wandering if it is possible to search inside those files (I mean particular fields, variables or calls) either from editor or some external program.
Thanks in advance.
GB.
 

MrMoo

Member
What do you mean by search the files for fields internally. If you're just looking to see if a .p or .i calls a field could you not do a search on your directory for files containing the field you're looking for?
 

MrMoo

Member
I mean I may be looking at this all wrong but can you use Windows Search or another desktop search and use the word or phrase in a file to search. It is probably too low level for what you want but not exactly sure how you intend to use this.
 
I tried that and then I tried google desktop as well... didn't work so I came here for help. textpad actually works very well.. It gives you all of the instances of the search query in a very organized structure.
 

MrMoo

Member
I'll have to give Textpad a try, though from checking it out quickly the search seems similar to Windows Search Companion which is how I was envisioning you could find the information.

Thansk for the tip on the new software to try out.
 

tamhas

ProgressTalk.com Sponsor
Text search tools can help, but have an inherent difficulty because they are not knowledgeable about the syntax of ABL. So, searching for a given text string can easily give you false matches in comments, longer strings, keywords, etc. Plus, while ABL might allow you to abbreviate keywords and database names as long as they are ambiguous, the search tool knows knowing about this and won't find those instances.

To do syntactically meaningful searching you should look at Proparse and ProRefactor
http://www.oehive.org/taxonomy/term/131
 

Jupiter

Member
Just wanted to share my experience. Windows search for a text string helps in Windows 2000 and 2003 but not in XP. But there are tools like ZTreeWin that does it for you. For example, if you want to know how many files in your source code uses "dbname.tablename.fieldname" string in a system with Windows XP, ZTreeWin can serve the purpose.
 

Casper

ProgressTalk.com Moderator
Staff member
windows search for a text string also works in XP. If it doesnt work then the extentsion isn't registered.
Here is a simple VB script which solves the problem on XP.

Rename the file to .vbs

Casper.
 

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  • xp_persisthandler.txt
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joey.jeremiah

ProgressTalk Moderator
Staff member
i also like using findstr on windows or grep on unix,

both support regex and theres no need to install anything.


for example:

findstr /sim /C:"for each item" *.p *.i
 

tamhas

ProgressTalk.com Sponsor
But, again, *all* string matching utilities, as useful as they are, are searching based only on patterns of characters without any intelligence about the ABL syntax. So a search for "for each X" will fail to find "for each X" simply because someone happened to put in an extra space. These tools will also find strings in comments and are unable to distinguish between variable names, field names, quoted strings, and keywords, all of which might contain the same variable string.

So, beware, or get a better tool.
 
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