[Enhancement] Better 'cqsearch.exe' output results

[pidgeon777]

[Enhancement] Better 'cqsearch.exe' output results

[ruben2020]

Hi @pidgeon777
It's a bit hard because existing plugins for vim and visual studio code depend on the current output format of cqsearch CLI.
Do you have any use cases for this, from cqsearch CLI?
i think you can get the same information from CodeQuery GUI.

[ruben2020]

@pidgeon777
The first column is not redundant. If you do a non-exact search for "button", it will also show "clickbutton", "smallbutton", "buttonclick" and so on.

[pidgeon777]

Hi @ruben2020

It's a bit hard because existing plugins for vim and visual studio code depend on the current output format of cqsearch CLI.

I think it could be easily solved by adding a further option argument to cqsearch. For example:

-F : Show the function name where the searched symbol/function call occurs.

By doing so, my proposed "enhanced" output format would be enabled only when specifying that switch, leaving the default cqsearch behaviour untouched.

Do you have any use cases for this, from cqsearch CLI?

Yes, cqsearch is very useful for example to look for symbol references or function calls.

Anyway, by also displaying the function where the symbol is referenced and applying some further filtering (for example with grep), it would be very easy to detect:

• Functions where a symbol is read.
• Functions where a symbol is written.
• Functions where a function is called (also doable with Graph mode, but textual through CLI is more powerful under certain circumstances).

For example, one could want to verify that a variable is read or written only in one function, and not in more of them.

Or check in which functions, and how many times, a function is called.

With my proposed output, it would be much easier to check for that, for example.

Finally, with CodeQuery GUI you are limited to the GUI itself.

With cqsearch output results being pure text could be further processed with interesting results.

The first column is not redundant. If you do a non-exact search for "button", it will also show "clickbutton", "smallbutton", "buttonclick" and so on.

My fault. If then, a new column could be added and resulting in this new output:

<Symbol Name>       <Function where it occurs>      <File:line>     <Line Text>

Where <Symbol Name> could be partial or exact.

Again, all of this could be enabled by specifying the -F switch, for example.