FileSeek RSS: Search string character encoding

RE: Search string character encoding

Binary Fortress Software — Thu, 22 Apr 2021 18:09:06 GMT

Hello,

We've released a new version of FileSeek that should have this issue fixed up. Please let us know if you run into any more troubles after updating.

Thanks!

RE: Search string character encoding

Binary Fortress Software — Wed, 28 Oct 2020 18:35:04 GMT

One can always hope

RE: Search string character encoding

Binary Fortress Software — Wed, 28 Oct 2020 18:26:46 GMT

No worries, glad I could help, and thank you for your purchase! It's not possible to enter the searches in hex or other representations as far as I know

RE: Search string character encoding

Binary Fortress Software — Wed, 28 Oct 2020 16:09:13 GMT

The main reason for my need is to be able to find strings in languages other than plain ASCII English.
Even listing the options in the FAQ would be a significant help.
If not a list, a reference to an acceptable format for this option.
Is it possible to enter a string as a sequence of either hex 0x?? bytes or other representations, say u+0123?

FWIW, I have just purchased a personal pro license.
Thank you sticking with me on resolving this problem.

RE: Search string character encoding

Binary Fortress Software — Wed, 28 Oct 2020 15:24:00 GMT

Glad to hear it! It's not a commonly used advanced setting, but we'll look into adding a better list of the available values to the online help section for it.

Thanks!

RE: Search string character encoding

Binary Fortress Software — Wed, 28 Oct 2020 02:18:31 GMT

Thank you, Keith,
Either one of those does make a big difference and all instances are found
With this 'adjustment', even my search for a UTF-8 string was successful, though I had to try several times to get the proper string in the Custom file Encoding Value.
Here is a place where more information in the FAQ, or even better in a drop down in the dialog to edit this value with valid strings would be very helpful and save time & frustration because it would make guessing (& cussing) unnecessary.

RE: Search string character encoding

Binary Fortress Software — Wed, 28 Oct 2020 01:27:21 GMT

Oh! Your Include Files is set to "Text Query" which doesn't support wildcards. You can either do just

.jpg

in Text Query mode, or you can change it to Pattern and do

*.jpg

RE: Search string character encoding

Binary Fortress Software — Mon, 26 Oct 2020 17:45:04 GMT

Not in that particular instance, but it looks the same before the run as it does after

RE: Search string character encoding

Binary Fortress Software — Mon, 26 Oct 2020 17:19:28 GMT

That all looks fine, but the tab for the search looks like it hasn't run yet. Did it run at all?

RE: Search string character encoding

Binary Fortress Software — Mon, 26 Oct 2020 16:00:05 GMT

see the attached

RE: Search string character encoding

Binary Fortress Software — Mon, 26 Oct 2020 15:25:39 GMT

Just the Search tab is fine

RE: Search string character encoding

Binary Fortress Software — Sat, 24 Oct 2020 02:28:11 GMT

Any specific 'page(s)'?

RE: Search string character encoding

Binary Fortress Software — Fri, 23 Oct 2020 18:49:12 GMT

Can you send me a screenshot of the FileSeek window again after you've tried the search?

RE: Search string character encoding

Binary Fortress Software — Thu, 22 Oct 2020 15:41:19 GMT

Nothing found for any value in that field.
According to AR, there are 9 files in that tree - and I know the results from AR are correct, because these really are only the same files in different places on the branches of the tree root

RE: Search string character encoding

Binary Fortress Software — Thu, 22 Oct 2020 13:47:48 GMT

I noticed in your screenshots that the Query box has its mode set to "Exact Match." Could you try changing that to "Query is Text Query?"

RE: Search string character encoding

Binary Fortress Software — Wed, 21 Oct 2020 15:41:36 GMT

Afraid not.
My 'real' test case has a number of similar files in a directory tree, including that smiley file in several branches, all containing that string, with one of the sub-directories also named Ducky
FS only finds the sub-directory on my system; if I rename the sub-directory, it does not even find that.
As a test, I also cleared out the field in Custom encoding, but it made no difference. It had been "UTF-8;us-ascii", I believe

RE: Search string character encoding

Binary Fortress Software — Tue, 20 Oct 2020 21:04:25 GMT

I'm able to find that string in the smiley1.jpg that you attached if I disable the "Process File Contents Using File Handlers" option on the Advanced tab. Does that work for you?

RE: Search string character encoding

Binary Fortress Software — Fri, 16 Oct 2020 21:56:15 GMT

Well, I have no idea how it searches, but I am attaching some screenshots and a test file for you.
As you can see, FS does not find anything in the one test file.
If I have missed an option, which would fix this, please let me know.
FWIW, these strings are part of the JPG 'guts' and are in ACII, for the most part, though some other strings of interest are in either UTF8 or multi-byte MBCS, even possibly UTF-16 though I have not been able to fully investigate that part

RE: Search string character encoding

Binary Fortress Software — Fri, 16 Oct 2020 15:40:25 GMT

FileSeek just does a straight plaintext search on the file contents unless there's a file handler for the type (e.g. .docx or .pdf). What kind of info are you finding with AgentRansack that you're not able to locate with FileSeek?

RE: Search string character encoding

Binary Fortress Software — Thu, 15 Oct 2020 16:18:40 GMT

Good to know that the contents are always searched.
Still, FS does not seem to find things the the old AgentRansack can find for me. While I know nothing of the search algorithm for either app, nor what the built-in character set option is set at for AR, for my needs AR seems to be more likely to give me the results expected

RE: Search string character encoding

Binary Fortress Software — Thu, 15 Oct 2020 14:29:22 GMT

The file contents will always be searched with the text in the Query box. On the Advanced tab, there are options to enable/disable also searching the file/folder name with the text from the Query box.

Thanks for the heads up on the image preview not clearing when a new search is started. I've added that to our list to fix up

Thanks!

RE: Search string character encoding

Binary Fortress Software — Fri, 09 Oct 2020 20:26:30 GMT

Hi Keith,
thank you for the information and my apologies for being slow to reply.
The encoding names look useful, but I still, I find FS rather confusing; when will it search for the query string in the file name and when will it look for text inside the files - assuming I specify a file pattern in the 'Include files' box.
Somehow, I have lost the option to search inside files, which seemed to work the first time I tried it

Also, FWIW, if FS finds a JPG file which contains the query string, it will show the corresponding image in the box at the lower right, but it will not clear that field the next time I start a new query

RE: Search string character encoding

Binary Fortress Software — Wed, 07 Oct 2020 14:10:46 GMT

Ok, you can actually set multiple encoding values in that setting, separated by a comma. The full list is here, make sure to use the "Name" field in the advanced setting: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.text.encoding?view=netframework-4.6.2#list-of-encodings

When you specify multiple encodings, FileSeek will search the file once for each encoding, so if you specify 3 encodings, it will search the file 3 separate times.

Hope that helps!

RE: Search string character encoding

Binary Fortress Software — Fri, 02 Oct 2020 15:01:23 GMT

Ok, thanks for clarifying! I will check in with our developers to see if there's a list somewhere of what encoding values can be used in that advanced setting.

RE: Search string character encoding

Binary Fortress Software — Wed, 30 Sep 2020 21:08:44 GMT

I use a number of utilities to view the data.
Unfortunately, I have found that not all programs, free & otherwise, which claim to be usable to view/edit/display JPG metadata stick to the specifications closely enough. Some are very selective about what they show or handle. (My main interest in all of this is genealogical metadata.)
Hence most of my work looking for data has been with hex editors, but the also are usually limited in their search option and typically allow searching only within a single file.
That is where utilities such as FileSearch look promising. Searching for JPG metadata normally involves only a (relatively small) number of special character encoding, if one sticks to the original spec. But I have found many metadata editors, which seem oblivious to the specs. This comes partly from a fault with the developers, but from also misunderstood specs/expectations and usage by users.
Being able to select the character encoding with reasonable ease would make the job a lot easier. At least the more common formats such as UTF-8, UTF-16, M$'s wide character sets, aside from plain ASCII would be a big help.
I quite understand that supporting arbitrary encodings might be a challenge and I don't really expect that.
Still, from various forums, I have found that others are struggling with similar issues, and a lot of their problems revolve around the numerous encodings used to handle the many European languages.
HTH