Free program to grep unicode text files in Windows?

Question

I have a collection of unicode text files (exported from regedit) and I'd like to pull out all the lines with a certain text on them.

I've tried Grep for Windows and findstr but both can't seem to handle the unicode encoding. My results are empty, but when I use the -v option (show non-matching lines), the output shows a NUL between each character.

Are there any free options to perform a simple grep on Unicode files in Windows?

Answer 1

is cygwin an option for you? maybe the grep that is builtin behaves better than the one you tried...

regards

Answer 2

check out BareGrep. I think it will do what you want.

Answer 3

Well, while findstr can't handle Unicode files directly, type does and findstr actually handles Unicode input without problems.

So what you need to do would just be

type myfile.txt | findstr "I'm searching for this"

> type uc-test.txt
Unicode test. äöüß
Another line
Something else
> findstr "Something" uc-test.txt

> findstr /v "Something" uc-test.txt
 ■U n i c o d e   t e s t .   õ ÷ ³ ▀
 A n o t h e r   l i n e
 S o m e t h i n g   e l s e
> type uc-test.txt | findstr "Another"
Another line

Answer 4

perl -CSD -ne 'print if m{\Qyour text here\E}' file.txt

Answer 5

definitely go with cygwin (using x server) - the latest supports utf8. At my last gig, I was doing a lot of work with CJK characters. Using cygwin's x server, you can search on any characters and display any characters that you have a fixed width font for. Also check out od and xxd which makes it easy to enter your searches using hex characters eg: $ echo '?' | grep $(echo '3f' | xxd -p -r)

Answer 6

I have not used windows for years, but I know two alternatives to grep which are written in interpreted language and therefore should run on any platform:

• ack-grep (in perl)
• grin (in python)

Both are command-line tool, but I assume you already have a solution for this if you have used grep for windows.

Have a look at them, I am sorry I can't help a fellow grepper better than this.

Answer 7

Just ran across grepWin which works perfectly for what I want here. Wish I would have found it earlier!