Any way to search for casts in java source code?

Question

Anyone know of a decent way to search your java source files to find all the casts?
I ended up doing a simple text search for
     " = ("(quote marks not included) which works for my code because I am strict about writing my casts with spaces like
     String s = (String) iterator.next();Unfortunately, the above search has all kinds of problems with both false positives and negatives. It picks up lots of irrelevant lines like
     int index = (number > 0) ? 0 : 1;as well as misses casts that appear nested inside expressions like
     ((String) iter.next()).charAt(...)I suppose that one could do a regular expression search for any pair of open and close parens which bound non-blank text, but that would pick up even more non-cast expressions in typical java code.
I think that the only way to properly do this is to have a tool which understands java syntax.
Anyone know of an IDE which will do this? Does IntelliJ or Netbeans support this kind of search?
In case you are wondering why I am interested in this, it is because I am refactoring some code to fully use generics, and searching for casts is one source of identifying candidates for genericity.

Answer 1

cliffblob wrote:
Better late than never?Yes!
cliffblob wrote:
...The answer I found to ID unnecessary casts was, using Eclipse IDE, In compiler error and warning preferences to warn on unnecessary casts.Thanks for pointing IDEs out. I just opened IntelliJ, and going back to at least version 7.04 (maybe earlier) they have an inspection for "Redundant type cast".
cliffblob wrote:
I would still be interested to know if there is a way to identify casts in general in your source, perhaps now four years later there is a way?The only solutions that I can think of are either a complicated regex search, or you must use some tool like an IDE that understand Java syntax and can determine if a cast is happening.