Regexp search in Net panel

[Lawrence San]

​I'm in Firebug's Net panel, with the Images button highlighted, and when I refresh the page a long list of my images shows up as expected. I'm trying to find only a few specific images in the list, using the search box in the upper-right corner. As long as I type in a literal part of the image name, this works.

However, I want to find any images that have two consecutive numerals anywhere in their filename. So I click in the search box, and in the popdown dialog that appears, I check Use Regular Expression.

I can't get this to work. If I type in just a literal like 04 or 05 it works just as it did before I chose Use Regular Expression. But if I try to use a real pattern, the whole text-entry box just turns red and beeps at me. I've tried  \d\d  and .*\d\d.*  and  [0-9]+ and none of them work. These are very simple patterns; what am I doing wrong? Thanks.​

[Florent Fayolle]

I think you're not doing anything wrong. Your issue looks to be reported here: https://code.google.com/p/fbug/issues/detail?id=4622

But to be honest with you, we are working on Firebug 3.0, which will be based on the DevTools.

I created an issue here to ask for the reimplementation of the "use regular expression" in Firebug 3.0, including for the Net panel.

Is this a blocking issue for you?

Florent

[Lawrence San]

Hmm... even after googling the phrase "blocking issue" I'm still not exactly sure what it means... if I were part of the Firebug development team, I guess it would mean not going forward with a new version/release until that bug were fixed (?). But since I'm not part of that team... does it mean "is this an issue that prevents you from using Firebug on your project" or something like that?

Anyway, no, it doesn't stop me from using Firebug. Perhaps (at the risk of trying everyone's patience) I can describe what I'm trying to do...

I'm developing some web pages with a large number of images on each page. I'm working on some PHP + JavaScript to pre-load (download to the browser cache) some of the images that will likely be called on subsequent similar pages that the user is likely to navigate to, which involves making predictive guesses. I keep fiddling with the pre-loading code and then reloading the browser, over and over, and each time I need to see which images do or do not get downloaded from my development server to the browser. There's only a few images I actually care about on each page, but they tend to get buried in the long list of hundreds of irrelevant images. It really slows me down to have to hunt through the list each time I make a code change and refresh the browser.

The important/relevant images have two distinctive features: their filenames always contain two consecutive numerals, and they're the largest (filesize) images in the list. I don't really care whether I'm observing them as they actually enter the cache, or observing them simply downloading (after I flush and disable the cache) -- that doesn't matter -- I just need to know whether they were called from the server, or not, each time.

I've tried using Firebug's Net panel, and various Firefox extensions like Live HTTP Headers, HttpFox, CacheViewer, and similar, to generate a list of currently downloaded images. They're all very awkward to use in this way, for various reasons, and I've been unable to find anything that can show me a concise view of only what I want to see. So far the best (strangely enough) has been the Network tab in IE's built-in Developer tools, but that's not great either, plus it's awkward because I run IE/Win7 within a VM on my Mac.

I'm surprised there isn't some tool (or maybe there is?) that can filter out (hide from the list) everything that's loading into the browser, except for what matches a regular expression. That's why I was playing with the regexp search in Firebug's Net panel... but even if it worked, it looks like it would at best only highlight items in the list (which I'd still have to scroll down each time to find), not actually filter out everything else as I'd prefer.

Sorry for the lengthy description. Any suggestions would be very welcome. Thank you.

[Florent FAYOLLE]

does it mean "is this an issue that prevents you from using Firebug on your project" or something like that?

Indeed, that's rather what I meant :).

For your need you can use NetExport (Firebug extension maintained by the Firebug Working Group): http://www.softwareishard.com/blog/netexport/

And maybe automate using Selenium: http://www.softwareishard.com/blog/firebug/automate-page-load-performance-testing-with-firebug-and-selenium/

When you get the HAR files, which are JSON files, you can query them to extract the URL of the images you want (with some program you write).

Florent

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[Sebastian Zartner]

That's why I was playing with the regexp search in Firebug's Net panel... but even if it worked, it looks like it would at best only highlight items in the list (which I'd still have to scroll down each time to find), not actually filter out everything else as I'd prefer.

 This is covered in issue 3560. You may want to create a new request for it in the GitHub issue tracker.

Sebastian

[Lawrence San]

Thank you for the suggestions, Florent. I looked at the NetExport and Selenium pages, and it seems like they're for saving files from the network results. But I'm involved in a rapid-fire tweak/reload/view cycle -- I don't want to export and then view files, that seems too complicated and slow. I just want to visualize the downloading stuff (or, better yet, just the subset I'm interested in) in real time. Like the Firebug Net panel does, but with filtered results. Perhaps the Preview function of HAR Viewer could be used that way? That doesn't sound like its purpose, though.

Sebastian, I added my two cents to the end of issue 3560, but that's an old thread so it doesn't sound like there's a lot of impetus for that feature. I don't have a GitHub account so it wouldn't let me add an issue there.

I appreciate your responses.

Lawrence

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[Sebastian Zartner]

On Monday, December 8, 2014 12:44:52 AM UTC+1, San wrote:

Thank you for the suggestions, Florent. I looked at the NetExport and Selenium pages, and it seems like they're for saving files from the network results.

As Florent mentioned you would need to write your own tool to parse the files NetExport generates. Of course he just meant that as a workaround for the inability to filter network requests.
 

Sebastian, I added my two cents to the end of issue 3560, but that's an old thread so it doesn't sound like there's a lot of impetus for that feature. I don't have a GitHub account so it wouldn't let me add an issue there.

I just saw that reporting this against Firebug may not be necessary as filtering is already requested for the Firefox DevTools in bug 859047.

Sebastian