spacegrep

This is an attempt at providing a grep-like tool for finding patterns in human-readable code written in any language. It has the following properties:

• A document is interpreted as a nested sequence of ascii words, ascii punctuation, and other bytes.
• ... allows skipping non-matching elements, up to 10 lines down the last match.
• $X matches any word.
• The interpretation of a document can be inspected with the spacecat command.
• Indentation determines primary nesting in the document.
• Common ascii braces (), [], and {} introduce secondary nesting but only within single lines. Therefore, misinterpreted or mismatched braces don't disturb the structure of the rest of document.
• The document must be at least as indented as the pattern: any indentation specified in the pattern must be honored in the document.

Sample pattern exec.pat:

exec(...)

Sample document exec.doc:

import exec as safe_function
safe_function(user_input)

exec("ls")

exec(some_var)

some_exec(foo)

exec (foo)

exec (
    bar
)

# exec(foo)

print("exec(bar)")

Output:

$ spacegrep -p exec.pat -d exec.doc
exec("ls")
exec(some_var)
exec (foo)
exec (
    bar
)
# exec(foo)
print("exec(bar)")

Install

make build  # builds the spacegrep binary
make install # puts spacegrep on your $PATH