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Comment by cmccabe | Hacker News Reader

Using grep with strings that span multiple lines is not a big deal. Use the -A and -B flags, as well as --with-filename.

Widely agreed-on code standards do exist. Usually they are either 80 or 100 characters per line.

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This is not always true:

    log.msg("error with " +
            "some description")
    
    grep "error with some description" ...

Yes, there are standards for coding. They are usually 80 or 100 characters. And each one has a different way of handling the wrapping cases, splitting strings, wrapping values (parens, line join with \, concatenation, etc.)

You can use something like this:

  grep --with-filename -A 3 error $FILES | grep -C 3 description

If that's not elegant enough for you, there are even tools like pcregrep that can do multiline matches. Don't uglify the code because of easily solved tool problems.

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