Unicode grep for Windows

Question

Is there 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 Windows Explorer)
• Plain text, regular expression, and 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 regular expression searches for the future)
• Pattern test form
• Search result highlighting
• Does not require installation (can be run from a USB drive)

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

Answer 2

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 3

Most versions of Windows include the command "findstr" which works much like grep. I do not know about its Unicode abilities, but to my knowledge there shouldn't be any problems with that.

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

Yes, as fluxtendu mentions,

• PowerGREP 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 Unix grep. Just make sure to append your PATH and you can use it in the Windows shell too.