A Multi-block Scheme for Searching Source Codes

Abstract

The large amounts of software source code projects available on the Internet or within companies are creating new information retrieval challenges. Present-day source code search engines, such as Google Code Search, tend to treat source code as pure text, as they do with web pages. However, source code files differ from web pages or pure text files in that each file may contain certain blocks expressing different functions. Developers use API-statements to complete functions within a source file and use comments to indicate the meaning of each function. In this paper, we segment source code files into two types of block, code-data block and metadata block, that possess different stemming and stop word filtering processes used in building the source code index. Finally, we propose an auto block-specified query processing approach to assist users in searching for specific code block within a source file. Experimental results indicate that our approach provides a more flexible source code search mechanism that allows a greater number of relevant items to be found.