Text extraction in viewer plugin

Help & Support
1

Hi. I'm wondering if this feature exists... if not, I'd like to request it.

The general text viewer plugin can view any type of file, in either plain text (which shows mostly garbage for non-text files), or hex... which is cool. It would be great to also have a mode which extracts and shows just text strings in any file type, similar to the Unix "strings" command. Or maybe a filtering option in hex view, which hides large segments of non-text data, showing just the text segments.

Related feature: regarding the ubiquitous ASCII/ANSI/UTF8/UTF16 confusion, is there a way to force the text viewer to decode the text in a specific mode?

Thanks.

2

You could make a button which uses the SysInternals Strings.exe:

(See: How to add example buttons to your toolbars and menus)

<?xml version="1.0"?> <button backcol="none" display="both" label_pos="right" separate="yes" textcol="none"> <label>Strings</label> <icon1>#read</icon1> <function type="batch"> <instruction>&quot;C:\Windows\System32\strings.exe&quot; {filepath$}</instruction> <instruction>pause</instruction> </function> </button>

The result appears in a DOS window but you can still scroll around in it and copy & paste things so I find it good enough for something that I don't use very often.

Not at the moment. The viewer requires a byte-order mark at the start of unicode files.

Maybe a "Force Encoding" option in the Text viewer's context menu would make sense. (You can request such a thing via GPSoft's site.)