Find in Files: Can I search in text (non-binary) files only?

spedinfargo · Sep 23, 2015#12015-09-23T17:39+00:00

Is there a way to tell Find in Files to ignore all binary files when searching? I end up putting a ton of common binary extensions in the ignore field (.exe, .dll, .zip, etc. etc.) but it's manual and only as good as the ones I can think of. It would be nice if there was a way to tell it to just search in anything that's obviously a text file...

Not sure if it is possible to tell programmatically or not, so may not be possible.

Mofi · Sep 24, 2015#22015-09-24T05:13+00:00

On Windows there is no common definition which file extensions are used for text files. So you have to define the file extensions list(s) by yourself.

There is no possibility to define a two step Find in Files which in first step evaluates for example the first 16 KB of a file to determine if it is (most likely) a binary or a text file and in second step runs the find on text files only.

My suggestion is to define in field In files/types separated by semicolons the list of file extensions which belong to text files. This list is definitely shorter than the ignore file extensions list. There are much more file extensions for binary files than for text files.