Usually I use Notepad++ to search in file(s) using regular expressions. Today I am wondering if there is a PDF program that does the same for PDFs. Of course I could convert the PDF to text and use Notepad++ but is there a more easy way without converting?
2
-
1What OS are you using?– Scott McClenningCommented Mar 15, 2012 at 5:40
-
Windows Developer Preview and Windows 7– Michael S.Commented Mar 15, 2012 at 5:41
Add a comment
|
2 Answers
several options:
- Agent Ransack (top answer in Best way to *confidently* search files and contents in Windows without using an indexing service? )
- DnGrep which is a Free and Open source software. Unfortunately it is at the moment only available on Windows. (a feature request has been opened for other platforms here)
-
1
- Agent Ransack is free (lite) and supports PDF as its release notes confirm.
- PowerGREP is a commercial product.
Just as you said, the evident alternative is to convert PDFs to text. One way for a programmer to set that up for bulk processing is by using the Python package PDFMiner. Agent Ransack uses "pdftotext" from the Xpdf project (and you can too).
-
-
Thanks! I looked more closely. The vendor's release notes confirm that File Locator Lite aka Agent Ransack does support PDF. Editing my answer.– minopretCommented Mar 15, 2012 at 6:41
-
Agent Ransack does the job. You might also want to try DnGrep. Commented Mar 15, 2012 at 8:08