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FSEARCH trouble

May
12
3
Hi Rex and all,

Well I realize I'm late to the party on this but I did finally switch my aliases from using FFIND to FSEARCH -- neither of which I use too often -- and this use this morning showed something odd. I was searching for a name, "Ethridge", in my MS Word files. It's there in three files but not in any of the other 2,000+. FFIND finds it but FSEARCH doesn't. Certainly this is most likely operator error but not seeing what it is. If I eliminate the "/lv" and/or use the dialog I get the same results. There is no alias for FFIND or FSEARCH. Test uses of FSEARCH in other directories seem to behave OK.

TCC 33.00.11.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Tom


[d:\pc]ffind /lvt"Ethridge" /s *.doc*

---- D:\PC\annoulb2.doc
[2] [redacted]

---- D:\PC\annoulbl.doc
[2] [redacted]

---- D:\PC\ANNOULS2.doc
[2]

3 lines in 3 files

[d:\pc]fsearch /lvt"Ethridge" /s *.doc*

Matching lines: 0 Matching files: 0 Total files searched: 2048

[d:\pc]
 
FSEARCH is intended to search text files; a Word .doc file is definitely NOT a text file. FSEARCH is probably finding embedded NULLs in the file which is terminating the search.

FFIND on the other hand is doing a byte-by-byte read, which will ignore the embedded NULLs but is also much slower.
 
Thanks Rex. Blocks of text in Word files are usually there as just plain text, occasionally with special characters at paragraph breaks etc. I looked with VIEW and the word I was searching for is in the file with nothing embedded within it, but there are plenty of NULs also, including before that word, so if those terminate the FSEARCH search that explains it. Finding a Word file that contains a particular short bit of text is a pretty common use case for me, but I can continue to use FFIND for that.
 
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