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Bug 335104

Summary:	[console] Regular expression (regex) filter for the Console view
Product:	[Eclipse Project] Platform	Reporter:	Christian Jean <christian.jean>
Component:	Debug	Assignee:	Platform-Debug-Inbox <platform-debug-inbox>
Status:	CLOSED WONTFIX	QA Contact:
Severity:	enhancement
Priority:	P3	CC:	pawel.1.piech, pwebster, remy.suen, tom.schindl
Version:	3.7
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	All
Whiteboard:	stalebug

Description Christian Jean

2011-01-23 02:16:33 EST

Build Identifier: All

So many times I've ran an application and needed a way to filter out the Console output.  In an ideal situation, you could stop the application, set the new Log4j configuration and restart the application.  But in reality, sometimes, you just can't stop and restart.  And sometimes, it's not as convenient as a Log4j configuration (ie: System.out or third-party code).

Here is what would be great to have:

1. The Console view has a 'regex' button (or 'grep' or whatever).
2. Clicking this button opens up a simple dialog window which has a text-box and a check-box.
3. In the text-box, you could enter any standard regular expression string.
4. The console view will filter out (not show in Console) all matching patterns.
5. If you check the 'Invert' check-box, it will invert the match (like the '-v' option in grep).
6. At any point in time, you could change the regex pattern and it would be applied immediately.

Use case:

Just the other day I needed to find a bug in a client/server application.  I was dumping all packets to the console (hex formatted).  After debugging for a while, I started to identify what was going on.  Had I been able to write regex patterns to only see specific packets when needed, it would have save me a lot of time and work.

I'm guessing that writing such a feature would be quite simple, while its usefulness and benefits are many.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
n/a

Comment 1 Lars Vogel

2019-11-14 03:18:05 EST

This bug hasn't had any activity in quite some time. Maybe the problem got resolved, was a duplicate of something else, or became less pressing for some reason - or maybe it's still relevant but just hasn't been looked at yet.

If you have further information on the current state of the bug, please add it. The information can be, for example, that the problem still occurs, that you still want the feature, that more information is needed, or that the bug is (for whatever reason) no longer relevant.

If the bug is still relevant, please remove the "stalebug" whiteboard tag.