utility to do global search/find in full text of the files in a folder, like source code files or unit tests

Usage

find_in_files(
  pattern,
  path = ".",
  recursive = TRUE,
  filename_pattern = "\\.R$|\\.r$",
  full.names = TRUE,
  ignorecomments = FALSE,
  ignore.case = TRUE,
  whole_line = TRUE,
  quiet = FALSE
)

Arguments

pattern: regular expression to look for
path: can be e.g., "./R" or "./tests/testthat" or "."
recursive: if TRUE, search includes subfolders (passed to list.files())
filename_pattern: default is R code files only! A regular expression that would limit file names to search
full.names: if TRUE, returns paths not just filenames (passed to list.files())
ignorecomments: omit hits from commented out lines
ignore.case: as in grep
whole_line: set it to FALSE to see only the matching fragments vs entire line of text that has a match in it
quiet: whether to print results or just invisibly return

Value

a list of named vectors, where names are file paths with hits, elements are vectors of text with hits.

Details

Also see (mostly undocumented) related functions EJAM:::found_in_N_files_T_times() and EJAM:::found_in_files() and EJAM:::grab_hits() and EJAM:::grepn()

Examples

EJAM:::find_in_files("[^_]logo_....",    path = "./R", whole_line = FALSE)
EJAM:::find_in_files("report_logo.....", path = "./R", whole_line = FALSE)
EJAM:::find_in_files("app_logo......",   path = "./R", whole_line = FALSE)

EJAM:::find_in_files("latlon_from_.{18}",    whole_line = F)
EJAM:::find_in_files("latlon_from_s.{9}",    whole_line = F)
EJAM:::find_in_files("latlon_from_mact.{9}", whole_line = F)

## useful reminders of how to filter lines of code vs comments when using find_in_files()

grepl_line_not_commented_out = "^[ ]*[^# ]+.*"  ## line starts with zero or more spaces followed by a non-space non-# character, so not commented out and not blank line, but may have a comment later in the line after code
grepl_line_commented_out     = "^[ |#]*#.*"     ## line starts with (zero or more spaces and then) a hash mark
grepl_line_may_have_comment  = "#.*"            ## line contains a hash mark somewhere, but that may be number sign within quoted text
 grepl(grepl_line_may_have_comment,  " print('The # of people is 4.')")  ## TRUE even though there is no comment here
 grepl(grepl_line_may_have_comment,  " # print('The number of people is 4.')") # a commented-out line
 grepl(grepl_line_may_have_comment,  "   print('The number of people is 4.')   # a comment only after the code")

EJAM:::find_in_files(paste0(grepl_line_not_commented_out, "xxx"))
EJAM:::find_in_files(paste0(grepl_line_commented_out,     "xxx"))
EJAM:::find_in_files(paste0(grepl_line_may_have_comment,  "xxx"))