Windows 7 search for text in files how to#
Windows 7 search for text in files pdf#
Windows 7 search for text in files code#

My main point was that since PDFs aren't plain-text you're not guaranteed accurate results unless you use an indexing service that understands the PDF format.ДЄnd if I'm reading that page right Method 2 should do what you want. This behavior occurs whether or not you use the Indexing service when you search. Windows XP does not search all file to enhance the performance of searching and to avoid extraneous results. In Microsoft Windows 2000 and earlier versions of Windows, all files are searched for the content that you specify. Here'a Microsoft KB article acknowledging this flaw with the implication they won't doing anything about it: Nothinman: it was the SAME PDF files where Win 2000 *could* find it and XP did not. Have you ever looked at the contents of a PDF? If the find in Win2k worked it was just dumb luck that the particular PDF you were looking for had that word in 1 of the few plain-text portions of the file and your awesome Pascal program would have the same problems.

Windows 7 search for text in files code#

I mean COME ON Microsoft! If 100+ comp sci undergrads every year could write the basic code to do this, why can't Microsoft? I'm a Computer Science graduate (of a long time ago) and a *class assignment* was to write a program (in Pascal at the time) to search files for some text supplied as input. I can't comprehend how Microsoft finds it so hard to write/fix a Search function. Thing is, and I tested this, the same 'Search.' feature worked in Windows 2000! I remember not being happy about this and subsequently recommending Agent Ransack to users. Highly recommended.Д®x, I remember encountering this problem with XP Search! Something glaring like not being able to search text within a PDF file(!) Apparently Microsoft knew about this and chose not to fix it. I don't think it integrates with the Windows 7 explorer shell though With Windows XP I use a great utility called Agent Ransack which provides Windows Explorer context menu access to itself, enabling you to search any files for any kind of text. Or even craft your own Perl script to do it. Getting a good Grep implementation is better (Cygnus tools rings a bell). Search Through File Contents in File Explorer Now, when you search for text in File Explorer, Windows will search the contents of files for. I did some research back in 2002 about the recognised filename extensions and XP's search, and the results were only a few hundred of the 17,000 'three character extensions' were searchable using Windows Explorer's search (and a small handful of longer 'extensions' in the ostensibly 'extension free' world of NTFS 5) Click Close on the Indexing Options dialog box. xxy extension, Windows does't know squat about it (even if it's just a plain text file), so won't even look at that file.

Windows 7 search for text in files how to#

doc file windows 'knows' how to search for text in that through the. It will only search for text based on the Class Identifier for the filename extension. One of the things that was very annoying about Windows XP was the limitations of its 'Search' ability.