Advance Find - Using Regular Expression to search

Hello all,

I am trying my hand at using a regular expression to find text within PDFs. To test my RegEx, I created a file with the text of "read after a write" as the only entry. I tried setting the RegEx to "read.*after" (as seen in the attachment), but DO is not displaying this file. What am I doing wrong?

Thanks,
Mark


Try with a text file first.

PDF files add the complication that you can only reliably search their contents if you have a working IFilter installed for them, which will translate their (possibly compressed or formatted) binary data into plain text for searching.

Line breaks between the two words may also cause that regexp to fail to find them, as it will probably search each line (depending on how the IFilter outputs the text, if an IFilter exists at all for PDF files on your system).

Leo,

It may not had been obvious, but in my original posting I did mentioned (perhaps not clearly) that I did create a simple text file that only contains "read after a write" which DO didn't not list in the results. Do you have any other ideas what I am doing wrong?

Thanks,
Mark

No, that looks correct to me, what I can see from the screenshot at least.

I checked a moment ago and a similar search was working as expected.

You might want to refine the name wildcard so the search isn't going into huge non-text files, which might make it take so long it looks like nothing is happening.

Leo,

Well, that was interesting. The search work as soon as I added a new line to the end of "read after a write", but did not work otherwise. Is the RegEx engine in DO expecting a new line?

Regards,
Mark

That seems like a bug. We'll look into it.