Grep Clone

This tutorial will be all about writing a simple grep clone in arc.

When completed our grep clone will be able to:

• Accept a PATTERN to search for
• Accept any number of FILES to search
• Ouptut lines of the FILES that match the PATTERN to stdout, with coloring

1. Setup

To begin with we need to scaffold the project

Install arc if you haven't already

$ pip install arc-cli

And create a file called grep_clone.py that contains the following:

examples/grep_clone/1_grep_clone.py

import arc


@arc.command()
def command():
    print("hello there!")


command()

This is just some simple scaffolding to get us started. Run it to make sure eveything is in order.

$ python grep_clone/1_grep_clone.py 

$ python grep_clone/1_grep_clone.py --help
USAGE
    1_grep_clone.py [--help] [--version]

OPTIONS
    --help (-h)     Shows help documentation
    --version (-v)  Displays the app's current version

2. Arguments

Next, we're going to want to add arguments to the command. For now, we'll only be implementing the PATTERN and FILES arguments. All of grep's many flags will be left alone for now.

examples/grep_clone/2_grep_clone.py

import re
import arc
from arc import types


@arc.command()
def command(pattern: re.Pattern, files: list[types.File.Read]):
    print(pattern)
    print(files)


command()

$ python grep_clone/2_grep_clone.py ^[\d+] docs/index.md docs/features.md
Invalid value for files: docs/index.md docs/features.md is not a valid list of files (No file named docs/index.md)

As you can see, we've already got a validated regex pattern, and file handles to each of the specified files.

3. Functionality

With type handling / data validation already out of the way, the implentation will be fairly straightfoward.

examples/grep_clone/3_grep_clone.py

import re
import arc
from arc import color
from arc.types import File


@arc.command()
def grep(pattern: re.Pattern, files: list[File.Read]):
    for file in files:  # Iterate over all the files
        for line in file.readlines():  # Iterate over all the line in the file
            if match := pattern.search(line):  # check for a match
                # If there is a match, highlight it
                colored = pattern.sub(
                    color.fg.RED + match.group() + color.effects.CLEAR,
                    line,
                )
                print(colored, end="")


grep()

Let's run this over a couple of arc's documentation files searching for references to arc

$ python grep_clone/3_grep_clone.py arc docs/index.md docs/features.md
Invalid value for files: docs/index.md docs/features.md is not a valid list of files (No file named docs/index.md)