When finding in files is it possible to show more than one line?

petey200

I looked around through AI and Google and did not see a solution to this. So apologize if this is an old rathole. However when searching using Find In Files. I would like to see more text above and/or below the keyword I am searching for. I am gathering with the default implementation of Notepad++ that is not possible but wondering if there was a plugin to help with this perhaps? Support for multiple keywords would be an additional plus.

I was looking at some other off the shelf tools and Notepad++ would be a better place to execute this type of search imo. The file extensions I am looking through are non-standard but do contain searchable text but the tool I looked at did not allow other non standard extensions. So Notepad++ had a leg up there.

Now if can get a bigger chunk of text surrounding the keyword returned. Problem is there are thousands of files I need to search through searching for the keyword “error” and I don’t have time to open each one to figure out more details about the error.

PeterJones

@petey200 ,

The Search Results panel is designed to only show one line per match (even if you do a search expression that matches text that crosses over lines, it will only show the first line of the match). There isn’t a way to increase context.

Support for multiple keywords would be an additional plus.

The existing regular expression (regex) feature already handles that.

Find What = \b(George|Gracie|whale)\b
- the \b matches “word boundary” so it would match George but not Georgene, etc.
- the (...) makes a group - without this logical group, the \b would have to be repeated at the beginning and end of each word, like \bGeorge\b|\bGracie\b|\bwhale\b
- the | means “OR”
- translated to english, this Find What means “match a boundary, then George or Gracie or whale, then another boundary”
Match Case = off
Search Mode = Regular Expression
. matches newline = off

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From our FAQ section, the Generic Regular Expression formula FAQ links to a post Generic Regex: Logic Gates for Regular Expressions which explains how to match lines with AND, OR, Exclusive-OR, and similar logical constructs.