On Thu 05 Jul 2012, Gilbert Houtekamer wrote:

> I sometimes find myself looking for misplaced and missing brackets for a long time, as context may given errors about a completely different location.
> 
> For example this one took me a while
>    \goto{\url[localhost20381}[url(localhost20381)]
>  
> (missing ] after this localhost20381).
> 
> Is there a SciTE or Notepad++ or command line script that anyone wrote to help with this?  It can be more or less sophisticated, but I found that missing / mismatched { [ ] } give the most confusing errors.  

I wrote the attached Python script a while ago to catch cases like
this, where an opening bracket accidentally ‘contains’ the whole rest
of the file. The script just keeps a running count of the nesting
level, and gives the number of the last line where the nesting level
was zero. Usually the offending bracket is at or very close to that
line. It does that same for \start... and \stop..., in a very stupid 
way (i.e. just counts them without identifying them, wouldn't
catch e.g. \startonething \stopsomeotherthing).

Hope it's helpful,

Pont