Find Text in Files and retrieve the line number

Question

I am trying to (programatically) find references to a specific string i.e. \'LOCK_ID\' within a large number of VB6 files. To help people navigate directly to the reference

Answer 1

UltraEdit32 is a quicker/easier way of achieving this. I think you don't need to re-create the wheel if there are huge number of wheels..

Answer 2

You may want to look into the FINDSTR command-line utility: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb490907.aspx

Answer 3

there are a number of tools to do this. I'll list them in edit as I think of them. The first to come to mind is TextPad (menu: search / search in files)

Second tool: UEStudio.

Both of these are paid tools. There are trials, they are quick to install, etc.

Failing that, you could install Cygwin for some Linux style grep functionality.

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Q&A to comments

in that case load the file in, split it on "\n", keep a counter, and do the search yourself -- probably with RegEx regular expression.

... there is a cool LINQ Expression here (you just need the where portion): Linq To Text Files

Work with the directory class recursively to catch all files.

http://www.dotnetperls.com/recursively-find-files

Answer 4

Here are the functions I used to achieve the desired functionality:

private void FindReferences( List<string> output, string searchPath, string searchString )
{
    if ( Directory.Exists( searchPath ) )
    {                                                                
        string[] files = Directory.GetFiles( searchPath, "*.*", SearchOption.AllDirectories );
        string line;

        // Loop through all the files in the specified directory & in all sub-directories
        foreach ( string file in files )
        {
            using ( StreamReader reader = new StreamReader( file ) )
            {
                int lineNumber = 1;
                while ( ( line = reader.ReadLine() ) != null )
                {
                    if ( line.Contains( searchString, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase ) )
                    {
                        output.Add( string.Format( "{0}:{1}", file, lineNumber ) );
                    }

                    lineNumber++;
                }
            }                   
        }
    }
}

Helper class:

/// <summary>
/// Determines whether the source string contains the specified value.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="source">The String to search.</param>
/// <param name="toCheck">The search criteria.</param>
/// <param name="comparisonOptions">The string comparison options to use.</param>
/// <returns>
///   <c>true</c> if the source contains the specified value; otherwise, <c>false</c>.
/// </returns>
public static bool Contains( this string source, string value, StringComparison comparisonOptions )
{
    return source.IndexOf( value, comparisonOptions ) >= 0;
}