I am searching thru Word Perfect documents. I realize Windows XP Pro has
changed it's searching component (Q309173), and I successfully made this
change. This fixes searching for single words, but when searching "multiple
words" aka "a phrase", I get nothing. Is there something I'm missing, or a
recommneded tool to use.

Thanks.

Agent Ransack is what I like.

http://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack/

Marc S wrote:

"Bob I" wrote in <news:uBxA9J$zIHA.2312@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl>:

I second the vote on Agent Ransack (free; the paid version is called
File Locator).

Besides being a better search utility, it also lets you use regular
expressions to find exactly what you want to look for. Also, unlike the
search in Windows XP which got crippled (which only shows matches on
files for which it has a viewer) from the version of it Windows 2000
(which would show any file having the specified string), Agent Ransack
is like the Windows 2000 search in finding any file that has the
specified string. You could be in a DOS shell and do a 'dir' command to
show a file but Windows XP's search won't find it even if the string is
in that file just because Windows XP doesn't have a viewer for that
file.

In the KB article that you mention, "A filter component is not
registered for the file type". The "filter" is the viewer required for
Windows XP's search to look into the file to find the string. While
more "filters" got added by SP-2, the fact that only those filetypes
will get listed in a search obviously means that other filetypes for
files that do exist won't be listed in the search results. You end up
with incomplete searches. Agent Ransack, like SysInternals 'string'
command, and other search tools, don't care what is the filetype of a
file or how its internal contents are structured for some open or closed
formatting scheme. They look in binary mode for the strings, much like
you would when using a hex editor.

The KB article mentions on how to search on all filetypes but that only
applies if you enable the file indexing service. I'm not interested in
impacting the responsiveness of my host nor do I need a utility to
organize my files which I already do very proficiently.

Agent Ransack. Yes.
Windows XP Search. No.

"VanguardLH" <V@nguard.LH> wrote in message
news:UMqdnaBVMN1EeMvVnZ2dnUVZ_j2dnZ2d@comcast.com. ..
That's not actually so, and it says as much on that page. I've made the
change and kept the service turned off.

I tweaked XP's pathetic Search as soon as I realised what a step down it was
from Win2k. But still, the distrust was there, and I only ever use Agent
Ransack myself now anyway.

Thirded.

"Scooby Doo" wrote:

Well, I spent the afternoon downloading and installing Agent Ransack. Then
I tested by adding the words "ending in" in the Containing text field in the
application. These words "ending in" are located in several Word Perfect
documents. None showed up in the search. If I limit the search to only th
word "ending", then I get them all. Why can't I view them when I search for
both words "ending in" (I have tried with and without quotes).

"Marc S" wrote in
<news:CC2BAA02-3FE3-4729-8344-CBF13DBCC1E4@microsoft.com>:

In Agent Ransack, under the Options tab, did you have either of the
"Regular Expressions" or "Match case" options enabled?

You sure there is a space character (hex 20) between the words "ending"
and "in"? I don't use WordPerfect. It might be inserting a
non-breaking space character, some formatting character(s), a newline or
line-break character if they are on different lines, etc. As I recall,
WordPerfect has a raw-source view so you could see the actual characters
in the document and now just how it renders those characters on the
screen.

You could try using regular expressions for the search string. For
example, to find the string which must appear one, or more, times would
be:

(ending in)+

However, to account for formatting characters between the words, Agent
Ransack unfortunately doesn't support the full functionality of PCRE
(Perl core regular expressions), which if available could then use:

(ending(\W)+in)+

This would look for one, or more, non-alphanumeric characters between
the two words, and that resulting phrase appearing one, or more, times.
Nor can I use:

(\bending\bin\b)+

which would look for the words on word boundaries (\b). The full
version might more fully support PCRE. There might be better freebie
search tools with fuller PCRE support. I haven't found one yet. So,
for now, I'm stuck using Agent Ransack looking for strings of words that
are separated by a space character. There are ways of generating an
equivalent to \W and \b using a character list (a list of characters
within square brackets which I could specify repeats one, or more,
times) but it wastes more time trying to compose the regular expression
than doing the search a few times with different search strings.