Search word files for text how to#
Search word files for text install#

Advanced Options will allow the filtering of files by size, file attributes and date. There are some very useful functions tucked away such as some simple file operations where you can copy or move the files with the matching string to a specified folder or even delete them permanently. Tick the “Replace with” box and enter a string to start a find and replace operation. The program also has a few basic selection filters, some copy, move and delete file operations and options to trim or remove blanks lines from the files while also being able to change the encoding of the files between Windows-1252/UTF-8/US-ASCII.įor normal usage WildReplace is an easy to use tool that can perform a simple search for a given string and show the results in an Explorer like color coded structured folder tree. Both the replace and rename functions require you to run the find function first and you simply need to supply a folder, a file name pattern and the optional content to search for, or reverse it using the Exclude tick box.

Search word files for text how to#

Just about all boxes where you need to enter text will accept regular expressions, go to Help -> Regex for more help on how to use them. And of course, you’ll need the Java Runtime Environment installed to use it. FAR is a cross platform and portable tool because it’s built on Java but that also makes it quite heavy on memory usage. The Find and Replace tool has options to simply search for strings inside files, replace the strings inside the matching files and also to find and replace text inside file names. Here’s a selection of 5 search and replace tools with varying functionality for you to look at.

Search word files for text install#

Thankfully there are tools around dedicated to performing the search and replace function and many are portable meaning if you only want to do it once or twice, there’s no need to install anything. There are several more advanced text editors around that could have some form of function to search and replace text strings, but if you don’t want to use the editor itself, this may seem bit pointless. It becomes even more frustrating when you want to search lots of files for keywords or phrases and replace them with something else because a tool like Notepad just doesn’t work for anything but the most basic of tasks.

Obviously this just isn’t efficient especially when there are hundreds or more files to look through. Something that you might find quite annoying when you have several text files which might have a certain name or text string that you want to search for is having to look through each one to try and find what you want.