457732 - mxr fails to find some regular expression matches

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Webtools Graveyard :: MXR, defect)

Description

[Nelson Bolyard (seldom reads bugmail)]

I want to search through all the files in nss/lib for instances of 
pk11_FindObjectByTemplate or
pk11_FindObjectsByTemplate

So I did a case-sensitive regular expression MXR search on the expression
pk11_FindObjects*ByTemplate in nss/lib of tree security.  The URL was
http://mxr.mozilla.org/security/search?string=pk11_FindObjects*ByTemplate&regexp=on&case=on&find=nss%2Flib&tree=security

The result claimed to have found 22 matching lines in 6 files.

But the correct result, which I got later from these searches in my own 
source tree starting in nss/lib:

find  . -name \*.[ch] | xargs grep -l 'pk11_FindObjects*ByTemplate' | wc -l
find  . -name \*.[ch] | xargs grep    'pk11_FindObjects*ByTemplate' | wc -l

includes 27 matching lines in 9 files.

This tells me that when I'm searching through NSS source code, trying to 
find all the callers of a function, or users of a macro, etc., 
I CANNOT rely on the output of MXR and know that I have found them all.
That makes MXR pretty useless.  This is major, maybe more.

Comment 1

[Nelson Bolyard (seldom reads bugmail)]

If I change the search expression from 
pk11_FindObjects*ByTemplate to
pk11_FindObject.*ByTemplate  
it finds all 27 matching lines in 9 files.

Of course, that more general expression has the potential to find many 
matches that I don't want.  In this case, I got lucky.

Comment 2

[timeless]

http://mxr-test.konigsberg.mozilla.org/security/search?string=pk11_FindObject&find=nss%2Flib&filter=pk11_FindObjects%3FByTemplate

does what you want. the mxr.mozilla.org tree is having indexing issues, but conceptually you want a perl regexp. just use a reasonably accurate fast glimpse search and then use a perl regexp in filter to get precisely what you want.

Comment 3

[Nelson Bolyard (seldom reads bugmail)]

No, I don't want to have to use two separate regular expression grammars,
and to understand the limitations of the flawed glimpse engine.  
I don't know perl regexp grammar and don't want to.

What I really want is grep expressions.  I'd settle for using the documented
glimpse grammar, if  it worked.  But as it stands, it's broken.  It does not
conform to its own specification.

Comment 4

[Nelson Bolyard (seldom reads bugmail)]

oh, and the konigsberg URL doesn't work for me.

Comment 5

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

mxr is gone, mass closing.
https://searchfox.org/ is a much better alternative.