Tag Matching

Our goal remains to add support for Ctags to an application. We know how to locate the relevant tags file, but what do we do with it? Fundamentally, we use the tag file to match identifiers against tags indexed by Ctags; let's make that specific, restricting ourselves for the moment to just working in the shell.

The tag file is structured as sorted lines of tab-separated records. The first field in the line is the tag, other fields identify the position of the tag in a particular source file. With this, we can check a candidate tag $TAG against the tag file $TAGFILE using look:

look "$TAG" "$TAGFILE"

Easy and fast.

To use tags to find the definition of a symbol, we'll want to hang onto all the information about each matching tag; the above use of look is all we need. For use in text completion, we'll want a longer pipeline eliminating extraneous information:

look "$TAG" "$TAGFILE" | cut -f1 | sort -u

The pipeline drops all fields but the first, the tag field, using cut and eliminates duplicates with sort -u (I suspect that uniq should work here, but look is curiously unspecific about whether it always produces its output in sorted order).

And that's it for matching tags. The file format was clearly set up with just this sort of use in mind. More details on the file format are available elsewhere.