Search in multiple files windows

Regular expressions use both literal characters and meta-characters to find patterns of text, rather than exact strings of characters. A literal character is a character that doesn't have a special meaning in the regular-expression syntax; instead, it matches an occurrence of that character. For example, letters and numbers are literal characters.

A meta-character is a symbol with special meaning an operator or delimiter in the regular-expression syntax. The special characters in regular expression syntax have the most power when you use them together. For example, use the combination of the wildcard character. Use the following expression as part of a larger expression to match any string beginning with b and ending with ing : b.

To search for multiple strings in a set of files, you must create a text file that contains each search criterion on a separate line. To find all occurrences of the word Windows with an initial capital letter W in the file proposal.

To search every file in the current directory and all subdirectories that contained the word Windows , regardless of the letter case, type:.

In the search results, click the arrow to the left of the file name to see the sentences containing your search terms.

For this purpose, however, you need to have a special plugin installed — PDF IFilter — which is used by Windows Search to index the contents of your files.

You will have to download and install it from the Adobe IFilter download page. Please keep in mind that Windows will need some time to index the contents of your files. It takes just a few steps to perform a search:. Download , install, and launch SeekFast. In the search results, click on the file name to open the PDF file, or click on the sentence to view a larger part of the text. UltraFinder is yet another tool developed by the creators of the very poplar text editor UltraEdit, which allows you to perform text searches in multiple PDFs.

Download and install UltraFinder on your computer, and launch it. UltraFinder has a lot of capabilities in terms of settings and filters; however, it has even more significant shortcomings, the main one being the extremely slow search process. Our last but not least pick is the open source tool DocFetcher. Like Windows Search, DocFetcher also performs indexing of the files in the folder that you want to search. Download , install, and launch the tool.

In the results window, click on each file name to view the text with the searched words highlighted. This was a brief summary of my experience in searching PDF files. Now I would like to hear from you! If this article was useful for you, or if you want to add something, leave a short comment in the section below. Your email address will not be published. Contents 1. Click on the file name if you want to open the file.

Advanced search is available in the free version. Shows sentences containing the searched word. T-Mobile iCloud Private Relay. Avira Antivirus Crypto Miner. Linux PinePhone Pro. Google Green Messages.

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Mount an ISO image in Windows. Boot Into Safe Mode.