Unicode Plain-Text File Full-Text Search Tool. ZhGrep is a cool tool to search all kinds of plain-text files encoded in no matter ASCII / Unicode or language-specific local encodings. The shortname of the program - ZhGrep, is borrowed from the classical Unix/Linux/BSD command grep. Apart from the name and helping people achieve a similar goal, the program has nothing else to do with grep.

Despite the long name "DAAV Full-Text Search Tool for Unicode Plain-Text Files" containing "Unicode", ZhGrep does not limit itself from searching only files saved in Unicode format (UTF-8, UCS-2/UTF-16 LE/BE, UCS-4/UTF-32), it reads and searches files saved in local French/German/Arabian/Hebrew/Japanese/Korean encodings (to be politically correct, they are not encodings but do have their respective local encodings), just to name a few.

When ZhGrep processes a text file, it auto-detects the encoding used when the text file was previously saved. Even for the same language, a text file could be saved in any possible encodings. An English plain-text file can be saved in ASCII, or ISO-8859-1, or UTF-8/16/32 as long as the creator would like to do so. Similar for Chinese, French, German, and any else languages.

Fortunately ZhGrep relies on internal algorithms to make such detection automatic. ZhGrep then uses the detected encoding to read and display the content of the matched plain-text file. ZhGrep also provides to the user the possibility to view the content in different encodings, some will work, others may just result in garbled text. In that case, switch back to the right encoding.

In most cases, the encoding auto-detection algorithms work pretty well. If you find the program miscalculate the encoding of your plain-text file, please do not hesitate to let us know so that we could improve the software for future releases.

ZhGrep looks at the suffix of a filename to decide whether the file is included as a plain-text one in a full-text search. However, files sometimes are not strictly named following this convention, e.g. a file named "binary.txt" may well contains only binary data in spite of its ".txt" suffix. In this case, ZhGrep still processes the file, but almost for sure, the file will not match any of your given keywords thus do not appear in the result file list.

Attention: When searching for filenames, ZhGrep does not exclude non-plain-text files. Namely, all files are searched in this case.

Currently, ZhGrep by default check files with the following suffixes when doing a full-text search, assuming they are all plain-text. (Please note, .doc and .pdf are not plain-text files!)
1. .txt, *.text
2. .html, *.htm, *.xml, *.sgml, *.sgm, *.opml, *.kml, *.lxfml, *.yml, *.yml2, *.yaml
3. .svg
4. .php, *.asp, *.js, *.css
5. .pl, *.perl, *.rb, *.ruby, *.lua, *.has
6. .lsp, *.lisp
7. .vhdl
8. .java, *.mf
9. .tcl, *.py, *.bas, *.vbs, *.pas
10. .c, *.cc, *.cpp, *.c++, *.cxx
11. .h, *.hh, *.hpp, *.h++, *.hxx
12. .f, *.for, *.f90
13. .mak, *.log, *.conf, *.cfg
14. .readme, *.me
15. .nfo
16. .ts, *.ui, *.qrc, *.pro, *.rc
17. .nsi, *.nsh
18. .bat, *.sh
19. .m3u, *.pls, *.lst
20. .lrc
21. .latex, *.bib, *.tex
22. .asc, *.ascii, *.utf8
23. .hz
24. .sms

The license of this software is Freeware, you can free download and free use this search tool software.