Search, Replace and Collect Information across Files and Folders on Your PC and Network

What You Can Achieve with PowerGREP

PowerGREP offers you a wealth of features that will come in handy in many situations when you want to find information, update or convert files, or extract useful information and statistics. PowerGREP is a knowledge worker's Swiss army knife.

Find Files and Information

Quickly search across files, folders and archives on your computer or network. Search for words, phrases or binary data. Or use regular expressions to describe the form of what you're looking for, and let PowerGREP find the actual text. Specify as many search terms as you want. Inspect the context of individual search matches, or group identical matches together.

Maintain and Convert Files with Search and Replace

Search and replace through heaps of files without opening them first. Preview the replacements without modifying any files. Make complex replacements or conversions with regular expressions. Replace or revert individual search matches at your leisure. Work safely with flexible backup and undo options.

Extract and Collect Information and Statistics

Gather statistics and extract data from files, archives and logs. Collect search matches into one or more new files. Use regular expressions to describe the form of the text you want to extract, and let PowerGREP collect all or part of the match. Sort matches, and group identical matches and count them, to produce informative statistics.

Search and replace automatically or interactively

PowerGREP's Unique Abilities

PowerGREP has a wide range of capabilities you won't find in any other Windows grep tool. While you will use some of these features only occasionally, they will surely save you a lot of time and tedious manual editing on many occasions.

Regular Expression Lists

Apply any number of search terms of regular expressions sequentially or concurrently. Complex search and replace operations often require multiple steps. Use PowerGREP to execute as many steps as you want in a single operation. Run the steps concurrently (search matches won't overlap), or sequentially (replacements cascade onto the following steps). Save all steps into a single PowerGREP Action for instant reuse.

Similarly, while searching or collecting data, use a list of search terms or regular expressions to find files matching different criteria, or to extract disparate information from each file.

Slice and Dice Files Any Way You Want

Limit your search to specific file sections. When updating web sites, limit the search and replace to HTML tags, or even specific HTML tags, or alternatively, skip HTML tags. When programming, search through only comments and/or strings, or alternatively, skip comments and/or strings. Use as many regular expressions as you want to section files.

Split files into records before searching. Instead of searching whole files at once, or line by line, split files into whichever record or block structure the files are formatted with. Specify record delimiters, or use regular expressions to match the records themselves.

When sectioning files or splitting them into records, you can work with the sections as a whole. Require search matches to span complete sections, collect or replace whole records, or return those records in which the search terms cannot be found.

Adapt Search Matches before Substitution or Collection

Post-process replacement text or text to be collected. Often, a search match isn't in the format you want it to be. PowerGREP's unique "extra processing" feature allows you to perform additional search and replace steps on each search match. E.g. when processing web logs, replace URL-encoded characters when extracting search engine keywords from referrer URLs.

Work Safely with Automatic Backup and Undo History

Stay safe with the permanent Undo History. When PowerGREP overwrites a file, it will create a backup copy of the original using your preferred naming style, placing the backup in your preferred location. If you change your mind about a particular action, undo it with just one click in PowerGREP's Undo History. Even after you've closed PowerGREP or rebooted your computer. Or, with another click, delete all backup files when they're no longer needed.

Don't Leave a Trace after Audits or Forensic Analysis

Perform audits and forensic analysis without leaving a trace on the computer you run PowerGREP on. Create a portable installation of PowerGREP onto a USB stick or any other removable device. You can use that portable installation on any PC. PowerGREP will automatically use the USB stick to save its settings, without touching the host computer, unless you explicitly tell PowerGREP to modify or delete certain files.

"I am working with my version of PowerGREP for some time now, and I really enjoy every single time where I am much faster doing complicated search&replace sessions on different files. Some people really can’t believe until they see what PowerGREP is capable of. Thanks for creating it."

-- Andreas Kroll
23 July 2008, Germany

Collecting Google search keywords from web logs with PowerGREP

"I just don't stop being amazed at PowerGREP. There is nothing to match it on any operating system. Every day I find some new amazing capability that makes it even more valuable. It's worth every penny of its price many times over. Thank you for creating it, and also for the best documentation of RegEx to be found anywhere."

-- Tim Green
10 November 2009, Germany

Compatible with a Wide Range of Software

PowerGREP is compatible with a wide range of software in various ways. Use industry standard regular expressions to specify text patterns, compatible with Perl, Java, .NET and many other applications and programming languages. Use the skills you already have with PowerGREP, or use your new-found skills in many situations.

Where most Windows grep tools support only Windows text files, and probably Unicode, PowerGREP supports a wide range of both current and legacy text file encodings: all Windows code pages, various Unicode transformations, all ISO-8859 character sets, most MS-DOS and PC DOS code pages, ECBDIC IBM mainframe code pages, KOI8, etc. Search through, edit and create text files in any of these encodings. Configure PowerGREP to use specific encodings for certain file types.

PowerGREP can also decode a variety of popular proprietary file formats: Microsoft Word documents (.doc and .dot files), Adobe Acrobat documents (.pdf files), Microsoft Excel spreadsheets (.xls files), Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets (.wks and .wk1 files) and Quattro Pro spreadsheets (.wq1, .wq2 and .wkq files). Search through these files as if they were plain text files, even if you don't have the original software that created those files.

PowerGREP supports the Office Open XML and OpenDocument formats used by Microsoft Office 2007 and OpenOffice. This includes Word 2007 documents (.docx files), Excel 2007 spreadsheets (.xlsx files), PowerPoint 2007 presentations (.pptx files), and all files saved by the various OpenOffice applications (.odf and other files).

"I like the use of proper Perl regex, so I don't have to remember some special proprietary syntax variation."

-- Martin Andersen
14 February 2003, Australia

See PowerGREP in Action

There are four ways to see PowerGREP in action:

Just sit back and watch the self-running demonstrations in your web browser.
Take a look at the screen shots.
Download the free evaluation version, which comes with full documentation.
Buy PowerGREP now and try it risk-free with our 3-month unconditional money-back guarantee.

Page URL: http://www.powergrep.com/benefits.html
Page last updated: 08 February 2010
Site last updated: 11 March 2010