Re: multi-file, multi-line PCRE (regex) editing support

On Monday 12 March 2007 7:33 pm, Greg Rundlett wrote:
> Way back in the stone age, I used Allaire Homesite to edit HTML.  It
> was a very good code editor for Windows.  In the modern era, circa
> 2001 I switched to Linux full-time and became a Quanta user.  I've
> been thrilled with Quanta.
>
> One thing I've noted missing however, is the ability to manage large
> sets of files (using a graphical IDE) to do Perl-compatible Regular
> Expression -based editing of file contents.  For example, say I have
> 10,000 PHP files, and they all say:
> <title>Hello World</title>
> <?
> // include foo library
> include ('foo.inc');
>
> Suppose I want to replace that with
>
> <?php
> $title='Hello World';
> include ('foo.php');
>
> There are multiple replacements with captured backreferences over
> multiple lines of 'input'.  An obvious job for using the strong regex
> abilities of PHP with it's built-in functions like preg_replace().
>
> Question 1: Can I create my own Kommander based applications that kick
> off classes or functions that I have defined in php?

Sure, no problem, but why not just use the KFileReplace plugin? It does it 
elegantly with multiline replace, backups, directory control, wildcards, 
saved searches and more.
>
> Continuing with my example, I have already defined (in a set of PHP
> files that I named for lack of a better term 'gregsEditor') a 'doEdit'
> function that would take arguments like the following:
>
> doEdit ($fileRegex, $pathString, $skipFiles, $verbose, $needle,
> $replacement, $backup, $test);
>
> Using the above scenario, the function call would be something like this:
>
> doEdit (
>   '/.*.html$/',
>   '/var/www/dev.example.com/public_html/',
>   null,
>   TRUE,
>   '|<title>(.*)</title>\n?(^// ?include foo library\n)?(<?\w
> include\(\'foo.inc\'))\n|',
>   '
>   <?php
>   $title=\'$1\';
>   include ('foo.php');
>   ',
>   false);
>
> Question 2:  Before I go implement this, is anyone aware of similar
> capabilities in code that I should know about rather than dusting off
> my old file editor code?
>
> I know Quanta has KFileReplace plugged in, but it does not handle
> multiple lines of source code as the selected source very well if at
> all, and it does not allow me fine-grained setting of the various
> pattern matching options (imUs) including look-ahead expressions etc.
> and lastly I do not know enough about the programmatic access to
> scripting the interaction for very specific and complex edits.
>
> Thanks,
> Greg
I haven't had to use KFileReplace's more advanced features a lot lately, but 
unless recent code cleanings have stripped out features it does handle multi 
line code and I thought it had an elegant way of handling strings and pattern 
recognition and rewriting. I guess I should go look at it's pattern matching 
abilities. I'll have to check to see if features got removed in rewrites.

You're of course welcome to build a Kommander based tool using PHP and even 
make it available via KNewStuff.
-- 
Eric Laffoon - Quanta+ Team Leader 
http://quanta.kdewebdev.org