code indexer

[Kevin Collins]

Hi,

I posted this message a few days ago in comp.unix.shell and got zero
responses. Can anyone here point me in the right direction?

Thanks,

Kevin
-----

Hi,

does anyone know of a tool I can use to create an index / search
engine for source code (ksh, sh, bash, perl, tcl, expect, awk, C,
java, etc)?

I'm thinking of something that would generate an index based on
keywords, "text", operators, functions, etc... I'm sure I can't be the
1st person to want something like this and I don't want to re-invent
the wheel.

I've looked at Exhuberant Ctags and its not quite what I need, but its
in the general vicinity.

I suspect that I could somehow use ViM syntax-highlighting to produce
indices on a file-by-file basis somehow since it knows all the "stuff"
I want to index for all those languages (it needs to for the
highlighting).

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Kevin

 

[Kris Wempa]

You can pretty much use any language that can build a parser for each of the
languages you want to do that for. I used a program called 'cscope' which
did something like that for C. You could type in a symbol and what you were
specifically looking for (definition, prototype, instance, etc.) and it
would search an entire directory structure for it. Your problem however is
far more complicated since you want it to apply to multiple languages.
Therefore, you would basically need a builtin parser for EACH language. I
would recommend getting the source code to one of the newer editors such as
the 'vim' that comes with Linux. This tool changes the color of your text,
depending on what type of file you are editing. It seems understand quite a
few languages and does a surprisingly good job. So far, it's worked on
HTML, C, Perl, C++, shell scripts and .conf files.

Kris