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I'm wondering if Perl is a good (easy to use and to learn) tool for this:

I'd like to do some custom preprocessing on my C/C++ source code. Basically, this's to allow me to insert my own custom annotations to the source code and generate new codes base on it. The required processing is mainly line oriented search/replace and insertion of new source code lines.

I can now think of 2 tools to achieve this: (1) Ultraedit's scripting feature (or any other capable editors). (2) Perl scripting.

Ultraedit's scripting looks good and I'm familiar with it. Best of all, its natural line oriented processing is a good abstraction for processing source code lines.

I'm wondering if Perl is also a good tool. I've ZERO experience with Perl except that I'm familiar with Perl style Regexpr used in other contexts. Is Perl a good tool for line oriented text processing? I'll have to search forward and backward and replace source code lines with some other texts.

JavaMan
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    This has a good chance of being closed as subjective and argumentative - but yes, perl (or python) would be good choices for most forms of text processing. – Erik Apr 29 '11 at 06:05

2 Answers2

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Perl is an excellent tool for this if you are familiar with it. It's essentially geared towards that kind of text analysis and translation, so you'll find that it has all of the extensions you could ask for.

Another option is to use UltraEdit's JavaScript functionality. The execution speed on it is a little slower than what you can get in Perl, but it provides a decent user interface where you can use UltraEdit to indicate where you want the changes to be made. Also, UltraEdit JavaScript has a great deal more flexibility than UltraEdit scripting.

I can't personally recommend Python for it, but I'm currently part of a company initiative to use it for exactly that kind of function, so hopefully the previous answerer is right.

Robert Rapplean
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Yes, Perl is a good tool for what you want. I'd go for Python, it's quick, easy, beautiful and has a good regex interface in the STL; but it's purely a matter of taste.

salezica
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