Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Searching multiple words in multiple files in eclipse

There are times when we have to search for the occurrences of multiple words in multiple files. In eclipse you can perform this search using File Search with regex expressions.

  • Open Search > File dialog.
  • In the Containing text: field enter (?<!^\s*(//|\*).*)(jack|jim)
  • Select the Regular expression check box and hit the search button.
The above steps shall parse thru all the files selected in the File name patterns section and list all the files with either jack or jim or both.

To understand the expression above, you can refer to http://www.eclipse.org/tptp/home/downloads/installguide/gla_42/ref/rregexp.html