SlickEdit User Guide

BUILDING AND COMPILING
Exclusions
Some of the error parsing expressions may match lines that you do not want recognized as errors. To
eliminate these “false positive” matches, define a new expression in the Exclusions category. The default
configuration file contains an expression to match the “Total Time” build output line that is generated by
SlickEdit®'s internal build system, vsbuild. Any new exclusion expressions you write should be very strict
to prevent real error lines from being skipped. You do not have to define match groups in the exclusion
expressions since they will not be used to extract file name and line number information.
Editing Expressions
To edit an existing expression, double-click the expression in the expression listing, or highlight the
expression and click the small Edit button to the right of the listing. This launches the same dialog that is
used to create a new expression.
Error Expression Groups
In order to navigate to the file that caused the build error or warning, the regular expression needs to be
able to identify the file name, and optionally the line and column number, as well as the error message.
This is accomplished by using four Tagged Expressions, also known as match groups. The following table
documents the match groups used to identify specific portions of an error message.
Group Number Group Syntax Purpose
0 {#0:p} Retrieves the file name or file path.
1 {#1:i} Retrieves the error line number.
2 {#2:i} Retrieves the error column.
3 {#3} Retrieves the error message text.
The expression for Group #3 can match any portion of the error message you like. The sample expression
{#3?+}$ is just matching all remaining characters up to the end of the line. The groups can occur in any
order in your expression. For example, if the build tool output places the file name, line, and column after
the error message, like the following hypothetical example:
Error E509: Bad format: found in /usr/tmp/file.x, line 23, column 13
then your expression might look something like the following:
^Error {#3?+} found in {#0:p},:bline:b{#1:i},:bcolumn:b{#2:i}$
Sample: Creating a New Error Parsing Expression
The steps below demonstrate creating a new regular expression to support error output from a Lint tool.
Below are some samples of the tool’s output.
Sample 1:
file.cpp (5) : Warning 200: Possible dereferencing of null pointer
Sample 2:
includes\file.h (17) : Warning 003: Macro not parenthesized
1. Create a new expression category, and name it “Lint”.
2. Highlight the newly created Lint category. The Expressions listing is empty.
182 SlickEdit® User Guide