Text search in OOo?

Eukaryote · Post by **Eukaryote** » 2004 Aug 05, 23:31

I just started using the evaluation download of x2. It's certainly excellent, but there's one thing I haven't figured out how to do. I'm using the OpenOffice.org suite (similar to Sun Star Office). It has similar functionality to Microsoft Office, but it stores its files as compressed xml archives. I need to be able to search for OOo document files based on whether they contain specified text. No luck doing this so far. I tried checking the "search archive" box without success. Any advice? Thanks and best regards.

fgagnon · Post by **fgagnon** » 2004 Aug 06, 00:38

The text search works when the search target appears in the file(s) as ASCII text. The file does not have to be pure ASCII, but the target strings must be recognizable as text with a text editor such as Editor² within the files being searched. So I think that searching for uncompressed text in compressed (or specially encoded) files will not work unless the windows shell? automatically decodes the file for x2's inspection. And I haven't seen any reports that x2 can decode XML file content (yet).

Eukaryote · Post by **Eukaryote** » 2004 Aug 06, 01:05

Fgagnon, thanks very much for the quick response. I just checked out a utility called ZipScan, which seems to do the job. It's not a full file manager, but rather a search utility. It has a specific option to recognize text inside OOo files, and it seems to work fine with them. Seems to me I noticed something in the x2 forums about being able to hook third-party search utilities to x2 lite, so I may give that a try.

Thanks again. Best regards -- Euk.

Eukaryote · Post by **Eukaryote** » 2004 Aug 06, 02:26

By following the instructions in the registry.txt file of the x2-lite installation folder, I was able to make ZipScan my default search utility for x2 lite. (I know this pertains to the "lite" forum, but it started here in the "pro" forum.) Now I can search for text in OpenOffice.org files. It would be nice to have the scrap-pane feature of the Pro version available -- not to mention its advanced path-designation and filtering features for searches. But the OOo search is more important for what I need to do.

I want to thank the proprieter for furninshing documentation and underlying customizability that made it possible to do this. This is a really classy application. Best regards -- Eukaryote