It has taken me a long time to warm to regular expressions but because they are used everywhere it was a sink-or-swim kind of thing. I put searching and sorting together because both should rely on a common matching algorithm that is, ideally, based on grep-style regular expressions. But if your editor of choice does not do that in a simple and intuitive way, find another editor. This is a very common thing to do, so there is nothing magic about BBEdit here. BBEdit makes this easy to do, while filtering out whitespace and such. This can be important when you are running side-by-side tests and looking at log output to see what has changed. Related to file handling is file differencing. If your files are much bigger than that, you might consider pre-filtering your data using grep or, at least, getting it open in BBEdit and then grepping the content into a smaller file for deeper analysis from there. Log files collected over an extended period of time, especially with elevated debug levels, can be very large and your text file cannot choke on them.īBEdit can easily chew through files of hundreds of megabytes, and even over 1Gb. File handlingĪ good text editor for debugging needs to handle large files. I'll drill into these a bit more, showing how BBEdit helps me solve problems. Be able to do smart comparisons between files.Be able to do (2) and possibly (3) on multiple files at once.Be able to do advanced sorting using grep-style (regular expression) patterns.Be able to do advanced searching using grep-style (regular expression) patterns.Be able to consume and efficiently work with large files.To be able successfully process text data, you need an editor that will:
BBEDIT GREP CHEAT SHEET CODE
Your source code is in text files, your log files are (generally) in text files, and just about any high-level diagnostic tool will allow its data to be exported into text files of some form.įor this reason, being able to manipulate text quickly, easily, and flexibly is a debugging power move. Text files are the lingua franca of software.
BBEDIT GREP CHEAT SHEET MAC
Because I am a Mac guy, I am focusing on BBEdit, but you can insert your favourite text editor into this discussion and hopefully map its equivalent features. In this post, I will focus on a tool I use all the time: BBEdit, by Bare Bones Software. While it is common to write simple tools during debugging, using COTS products that are focused on doing one thing well can greatly accelerate resolution of problems. However, any master debugger will have a set of go-to tools to elevate their game. In human years, BBEdit turns well over 30 and with that age comes wisdom.Understanding the debugging process deeply is the key to becoming a master debugger. Besides having become better at following Apple’s luminance schemes, the venerable text editor now offers a vastly simpler way to create Grep patterns, a Grep cheat sheet and the ability to create rectangular selections in documents with Soft Wrap Text set to active. I’m not a coder, not even with CSS or HTML anymore, but I do regularly search for words and sentences even that you can’t find by simply looking for the actual characters. In other words, I search for patterns and BBEdit has always been a great help with that. In the past, though, I had to re-adjust myself to using Grep which is a patterns lookup language that I am sure is logical from a coder’s perspective but not mine and a lot of people like me. Setting up a Grep pattern took a lot of time and sometimes I just couldn’t make one work at all.Įnter BBEdit 13’s Grep Cheat Sheet. This mnemonic apparatus appears as a popup menu button in the Find, Multi-File Search, and Pattern Playground windows. It also works within the “Process Lines Containing”, “Process Duplicates”, and “Sort Lines” dialogue boxes. The menu provides some common Grep pattern idioms and brief descriptions and the best part is that it allows you to choose one that will then literally be inserted into the pattern you already figured out and select it. In the Find and Multi-File Search windows, choosing an item from the cheat sheet also turns on the “Grep” option. That’s a first method BBEdit 13 uses to make Grep pattern creation better - as in more accurate and faster. The second way is the so-called “Pattern Playground” window. That one lets you interactively experiment with the behaviour of Grep patterns. It makes creating complicated patterns much less a trial-and-error affair, because you can see exactly what will match and how that works.
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