regex - Find extra space / new line after a closing ?> (php tag)

Question

So I have a space/new line after a closing ?> (php tag) that is breaking my application.

How can I find it easily I have 1000 of files and 100000 lines of code in this app.

Ideally im after some regex combined with find grep to run on a unix box.

Answer 1

The problem here is normal grep doesn't match multiple lines. So, I would install pcregrep and try the following command:

pcregrep -rMl '?>[s
]+z' *

This will match all files in the folder and subfolders (the -r part) using PCRE multiline match (the -M part), and only list their filenames (the -l part).

As for the pattern, well that matches ?> followed by 1 or more whitespace or newline characters, followed by the end of the file z. I found though, when I ran this on my folder, many of the PHP files do in fact end with a single newline. So you can update that regex to be '?>[s ]+ z' to match files with whitespace over and above the single character terminator.

Lastly, you can always use od -c filename to print unambiguous representation of the file if you need to check its exact character sequence ending.