complicated recommendation.. sought

From: Jeff Kish (jeff.kish_at_mro.com)
Date: 09/29/04 

Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 08:56:15 -0400

Greetings.

I am an extremely casual xemacs user. For example
I know how to type in a macro and repeat it, but not
too much beyond that.

I keep running into situatins where I'd like to do something, and I
don't know the best tool for the job, althought I have
my suspicions that xemacs "could" do the job... but it
might be incredibly complicated.

hence my question for a recommendation... even if it is not xemacs someone
here might run into similar situations.

The sort of task I keep running into is a desire to
find all occurences of a string that correlates to its
existence in other situations.

Specifically

say I'm looking at a set of xml files.
I'd like to find all lines containing 'lookups="xxx"'
(I'm not specifying the "xxx" here)
where the same "xxx" exists in a set of files (possibly the
same file) in the form: '<dialog id="xxx"'

So if I have:
a.xml with 'lookups="zzz" lookups="xxx" lookups="yyy" <dialog id="xxx" '
b.xml with 'lookups="xxx" <dialog id="zzz" '

then I could say
find all lines files matching c:\temp\a*.xml
that contains lines 'lookups="xxx"'
where the "xxx" string exists in
the files matching d:\temp\b*.xml
in the form 'lookups="xxx"'

and it would tell me no files found.

but if I swapped the two file specs around it would say
it found b.xml with lookups="xxx" referencing a.xml with <dialog id="xxx"

Thanks
Jeff Kish

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