Robo-FTP User's Guide > Script Programming > Script Commands > All Script Commands > SEARCHFILE - Search a text file for matching records and extract them into an array

Syntax:	SEARCHFILE	filename search varname [/regex /ignorecase]
Arguments:	filename	Variable or string specifying a file to search
	search	Variable or string specifying a pattern to look for.
	varname	Variable name to store the results in.
Options:	/regex	Optional argument enabling search pattern to support regular expressions
	/ignorecase	Search ignores case.

This script command is used to search a file for matches to search string. This command can serve one of 2 purposes. When used without /regex it can tell you how many times a string occurs in a file which will be stored as a number in varname. When used with the /regex option it becomes much more powerful and can be used to extract all matching records from a file into an array. In this case varname takes the following form.

Variable	Value
varname	number of matches
varname[n]	n is the 0 based match ( so the first match is varname[0] and the last is varname[n -1] )
varname[0][n]	n is the 0 based submatch for the first match. Submatches are covered in Regular Expressions

Suppose you wanted to get all the error messages out of a Robo-FTP script log file...

[2015-12-23 12:37:02.274000|info]Robo-FTP v3.10.0.43 SN: 021141000309

[2015-12-23 12:37:04.729000|info]CMD: display mine

[2015-12-23 12:37:04.730000|error]*Variable(s) not assigned or not present. [1009]

[2015-12-23 12:37:06.390000|info]CMD: exit

[2015-12-23 12:37:06.391000|info]*Exit Robo-FTP.

You could use

SEARCHFILE "Robo-FTP_Script.log" "^.*\|error](.*)$" errors /regex

After which

Variable	Value
errors	1
errors[0]	[2015-12-23 12:37:04.730000\|error]*Variable(s) not assigned or not present. [1009]
errors[0][0]	*Variable(s) not assigned or not present. [1009]

Note: SEARCHFILE is limited to files of 2 gigabytes in size or less.

Related command(s): READFILE