Unicode grep for Windows

Question

Does anyone know of a Unicode-aware grep for Windows 32-bit?

Answer 1

For a command line tool look at KeyboardMonkey answer (but i'm not sure about unicode support)

For an (open source) GUI tool: dnGrep

• Shell integration (ability to search from explorer)
• Plain text/regex/XPath search (including case-insensitive search)
• Phonetic search (using Bitap and Needleman-Wunch algorithms)
• File move/copy/delete actions
• Search inside archives / MS Word documents / PDF documents (via plug-ins)
• Undo functionality
• Optional integration with text editor (like notepad++)
• Bookmarks (ability to save regex searches for the future)
• Pattern test form
• Search result highlighting
• Does not require installation (can be run from USB drive)

For a more simple (only search) GUI tool: AstroGrep and for a more featured (and expensive) one: PowerGrep

Answer 2

Most Versions of Windows include the command "findstr" which works much like grep, i do not know about it's unicode abilities but to my knowledge there shouldn't be any problems with that.

Answer 3

Update: GnuWin32 is a more recently maintained port of these tools. (Thanks Quack)

Here is a list of the packages and to download grep individually.

Have a look at UnxUtils, which includes grep as well. I use these on my work PC, too.

Answer 4

Yes, as fluxtendu mentions,

• Power Grep Will do all that. But it is proprietary and costs 149 Euros.
• DnGrep will work too, and has a similar feature set for free.

However,

• Cygwin can also install grep (And a whole lot more if you want.) It will do unicode search with the -U switch. I would recommend Cygwin as the simplest solution if you're familiar with nix grep. Just make sure to append your PATH and you can use it in the windows shell too.

Answer 5

See BareGrep (free version has a startup splash screen), which seems to be a quite complete graphical grep. The documentation mentions support for "Many file formats", so I would imagine that Unicode is included.