Navigation

    Community

    • Login
    • Search
    • Recent
    • Tags
    • Popular
    • Users
    • Groups
    • Search

    Find in all files not working for me?

    Help wanted · · · – – – · · ·
    3
    5
    942
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as topic
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with topic management privileges can see it.
    • Markomarin
      Markomarin last edited by

      Dear users and developers, I have a folder with subfolders containing multiple .docx and .pdf files. When I do find in all files search with “one word” and “multiple words” it finds none or sometimes one skipping others. when I do it in an acrobat search it finds many.
      When I do search
      filter . is on
      normal mode
      “in all subfolders” is ticked
      What am I doing wrong?
      PS. I am using the latest version

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • PeterJones
        PeterJones last edited by

        @Markomarin ,

        Notepad++ is an editor for plaintext files. The file types .docx (modern MS Word files) and .pdf (Adobe’s Portable Document Format files) are binary (ie, not plaintext) files which can hold text, formatting, images, embedded objects, links, etc – but the “binary” means they are encoded in such a way that the sequence of bytes in the file (without additional decoding) do not necessarily match any plaintext representations (like ASCII, ISO 8859-*, or UTF8 Unicode), and are thus unintelligible to Notepad++. The fact that Notepad++'s search-in-files finds any matches in those file types is the exception, rather than the rule.

        Notepad++ was not built to read such binary files; if you want to read or search .docx files, you need to use a program (usually a word processor, such as MS Word, LibreOffice, OpenOffice, or the like) that is specifically designed to read such files; similarly, for reading .pdf files, you need a program like Adobe Acrobat Reader or other PDF-viewers or editors which are specifically designed to read such files. (The reason “acrobat search … finds many” is because acrobat is designed to read and search .pdf files)

        What you are asking is the equivalent of “I just brought my friend, who only reads English, over to index my personal library? Why is she not able to index my Russian, Hindi, and ancient Greek books?” That friend could be reasonably expected to understand British English, American English, Canadian English, and Australian English (in my analogy, various standard encodings of the same underlying text, such as the ASCII, UTF8, …), but it is unreasonable to expect her to also understand shorthand Sanskrit (in my analogy, a compressed binary format with its own proprietary encoding).

        Markomarin 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 4
        • Markomarin
          Markomarin @PeterJones last edited by

          @PeterJones Thank you for your explanatory answer and smart analogy. Thanks great community.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • guy038
            guy038 last edited by

            Hi @PeterJones,

            Your reply to @markomarin seems to be a good candidate for a FAQ Desk post ?!

            Cheers,

            guy038

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
            • PeterJones
              PeterJones last edited by

              Thanks for the vote of confidence. I’ve added it.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • First post
                Last post
              Copyright © 2014 NodeBB Forums | Contributors