Windows search behaving very very strange regarding asp files and <% signs

[Czar]

Here, do a little test

Create a directory with one text file

That text files has these basic lines

A
<%
B
%>

Now go into search and search for files in that directory with the letter B, you should get one result

Now rename the file to .asp ending and search for B again, you should get zero results for some weird reasons.

Anyway around this odd little problem?

 

[kamper]

The windows search is generally pretty bad at searching for content inside of files. As far as I know it only really tries files with the txt entension (although I've never tried to figure it all out). So your problem doesn't really have anything to do with asp and tags.

The best solution is grep.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Yeah. In W2K, the Explorer "search" feature would do a raw string-search through the binary content of files. XP changed things quite a bit, and you can only search through the contents of "known" filetypes by default, and it also tries to search through the files inside of ZIP files. How annoying. 🙁

 

[kamper]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
Yeah. In W2K, the Explorer "search" feature would do a raw string-search through the binary content of files. XP changed things quite a bit, and you can only search through the contents of "known" filetypes by default, and it also tries to search through the files inside of ZIP files. How annoying. 🙁

The zip file thing is extremely annoying. I'll sometimes use the search to find things on my computer at work but I also have tonnes of jar files, many of them duplicates and it wastes a lot of time searching through these... Now that I think about it, there has to be a way to tell it to skip over certain stuff.