Detection of Type-1 and Type-2 Code Clones Using Textual Analysis and Metrics

Clone Detection has considerably evolved over the last decade, leading to approaches with better results but with increasing complexity. Most of the existing approaches are limited to finding program fragments similar in their syntax or semantics, while the fraction of candidates that are actually clones and fraction of actual clones identified as candidates on the average remain similar. In this paper, a metric-based approach combined with the textual comparison of the source code for the detection of functional Clones in C source code has been proposed. Various metrics had been formulated and their values were utilized during the detection process. Compared to the other approaches, this method is considered to be the least complex and is to provide a more accurate and efficient way of Clone Detection. The results obtained had been compared with the two other existing tools for the open source project Weltab.