How can I search for a "file separator" (i.e. Alt/028) character within text files?

Question

Hi

How can I find plain text files (in this case .CSS files) that contain a "rogue" character?

The character is called "INFORMATION SEPARATOR FOUR" or "file separator" or Alt/028 ( http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode ... /index.htm )

In fact I can duplicate the problem in TextPad (7.2) by entering the character by holding down Alt and hitting 028 on numeric keyboard.

My problem however is how do I find and replace these characters that have infected a number of my CSS files? Because (unsurprisingly) you cant enter Alt/028 into the search and replace box in either TextPad... nor in Agent Ransack nor in FileLocatorPro.

In TextPad I can find this character by entering the search string of \x1c and doing a regular expression search. However sadly neither Agent Ransack nor FileLocatorPro seem to find the rogue character when I search using that string using "regular expression"...

Any thoughts?

Answer 1

Both Agent Ransack and FileLocator Pro filter out any characters in the ASCII range 0-31 (excluding 0x09 - tab) from the input stream. A future enhancement to FileLocator Pro for binary searching is planned but no firm ETA is available yet.

Comments

Oh dear. :(

I find it strange that the regular expression search string failed. Meanwhile I hate to have to tell you but it worked fine the freebie TextCrawler, which could also replace the text.

However all the above fail to do is "multi-line" searches. i.e. If I want to search for text that consists of multiple lines at once, none of the above let you enter multi-line searching...

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I was able to use Text Crawler and the use of a regular expression of "\x1c" to achieve the desired result.

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I have eventually managed to answer my own question. Text Crawler and the use of a regular expression of "\x1c" appears to be one solution.

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@ship69 Since this is a Mythicsoft specific QA site I've marked this answer as correct. For general QA have a look at superuser.com. FYI, try NotePad++ Find in Files functionality if you want multi-line regex.

Answer 2

I have eventually managed to answer my own question.

Text Crawler and the use of a regular expression of "\x1c" appears to be the answer.

Agent Ransack and FileLocator Pro filter are of no use.

Answer 3

I have eventually managed to answer my own question.
Text Crawler and the use of a regular expression of "\x1c" appears to be one solution.

One down-side of TextCrawler is that you can only search for text on one line. Anyone recommend something similarly low cost/free which does multi-line seaches?