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PowerGREP™ Version History

Software Quality at Just Great Software

Don't let the long lists of issues on this page make you think our products have a lot of problems. Quite to the contrary. All the bugs listed below are bugs that we have fixed. Many of these are corner cases reported by only one or perhaps a handful of our customers. Other software companies often don't spend any effort addressing such issues, much less list them publicly. We take pride in producing high quality software, and often release free updates to ensure you won't have any problems with our software.

If you ever hit a snag with PowerGREP, check here if you have the latest version. If you do, simply report the issue via email and we'll help you out as soon as we can.

Subscribe to the Just Great Software email newsletter or the Just Great Software RSS newsfeed if you'd like us to notify you of any product updates and other developments.

PowerGREP 3.4.2 - 18 January 2008

New features:

• Action: Hexadecimal escapes like \xFF in the replacement text to insert non-printable characters.
• Action: Unicode escapes \uFFFF and \x{FFFF} in the replacement text to insert characters that cannot be typed on the keyboard.
• Command Line: Search through files found in a previously saved search with /markresults previousresults.pgr. This parameter has the same effect as the Mark Files with Results command in the File Selector menu.
• Regex: Forward references (i.e. a backreference to a group defined after it) are now supported. E.g. (\2two|(one))+ will match oneonetwo instead of triggering an error.
• Setup: Create Portable Installation directly from the self-extracting setup. The Install on Removable Drive menu item in the Help menu was renamed for consistency.

Improvements:

• File Selector/Results: Right-clicking on an .xml file inside a .docx file now shows the option to open the .docx file in Word 2007.
• Results: When you group matches per unique match and double-click on a match to see in which files it was found, the Edit button will now be enabled an open the file the cursor points to in the match details instead of being disabled.

Bug fixes:

• Action: %SECTIONN% was numbered starting from zero instead of one.
• Action: Extra processing that reinserted the extra processing search match into the replacement (e.g. by using $0) sometimes caused PowerGREP to skip extra processing matches.
• Action: If you turned on the "invert results" checkbox for a find files action without using file sectioning, Action|Save did not save the invert results option into the .pga file.
• Action: Pressing F1 while the Comments edit box had keyboard focus caused PowerGREP to crash.
• Action: Starting a search with the "search type" set to "delimited regular expressions" but the actual search terms being all literal text caused an access violation.
• File Formats: Numbers in Excel spreadsheets will now be formatted like they are in Excel rather than always with 2 decimals and thousand separators.
• File Formats: PowerGREP will no longer lock up if it fails to convert an Excel file.
• File Selector: When using regular expressions for file masks, the comma in a quantifier like {1,3} was seen as a delimiter between file masks.
• Files saved by PowerGREP 3.4.0 and 3.4.1 indicated version 3.3 instead of 3.4 of the XML schema. This did not cause any problems in PowerGREP 3.4.0 and 3.4.1, but prevented PowerGREP 3.3.x from detecting it was opening files saved with a newer version.
• Path Placeholders: Paths with initial folders subtracted like %PATH-2% were not recognized as placeholders.
• Results: File headers were not shown if the display type was "file names only" and the totals option was anything except to show the totals with the file header (3.4.x only).
• Results: Loading a .pgr file that had search matches in a .zip or .jar file that no longer exists sometimes caused an access violation error.
• Vista: The Edit submenu when right-clicking on a file did not show the default application associated with the file.

PowerGREP 3.4.1 - 18 July 2007

Bug fixes:

• Conversion Manager: If the file PowerGREP Conversion Cache.dat could not be found in the folder configured as PowerGREP's conversion cache, PowerGREP 3.4.0 would delete everything in that folder. PowerGREP 3.4.1 will leave the folder's contents alone.
• Conversion Manager: The folder to use as the conversion cache was not properly initialized when running PowerGREP 3.4.0 for the first time, causing PowerGREP's installation folder to be used.
• Conversion Manager: The combination of the above two conversion manager bugs caused PowerGREP to delete all files in its installation folder. Our apologies to anyone who lost data saved in PowerGREP's installation folder due to this unfortunate bug.
• Conversion Manager: The conversion cache index was not properly read back when the conversion manager was started the next time, effectively causing the cache to be lost when all PowerGREP instances were closed. This bug also caused the conversion manager to use excessive amounts of memory in certain situations.
• Conversion Manager: If the running cache size was set to zero, PowerGREP was unable to convert PDF files.
• Core: Performing a search-and-replace using literal text (rather than binary data) through a binary file, caused the replacement to be inserted using two bytes per character instead of one byte (3.3.3 and 3.4.0 only).
• Editor: Saving a file caused an access violation. This did not prevent the file from being saved, but did prevent the file and its backup from being added to the Undo History. (3.4.0 only).
• Regex: ((?:abc)+) was optimized into (abc)+ which is not the same (the former captures all iterations; the latter only the last one) (3.4.0 only).
• Regex: In free-spacing mode, PowerGREP did not allow whitespace between a quantifier and the ? or + that follows it to make the quantifier lazy or possessive.
• Regex: In free-spacing mode, PowerGREP did not properly handle space between a token and quantifiers using the curly braces syntax.
• Regex: Octal escapes inside character classes caused an access violation.

PowerGREP 3.4.0 - 25 June 2007

New features:

• File Selector: Refresh command that refreshes the list of available drive letters, marks all folders as needing to be globbed again, and immediately updates all expanded folder tree nodes.
• Preferences, Encoding: Option to detect encoding based on the HTML Content-Type meta tag.
• Preferences, Encoding: Option to preserve the presence/absence of the BOM in Unicode files.
• Preferences, File Formats: Extensions of files to be treated as zip archives (*.zip, *.jar, etc.) and files to be treated as zip documents (*.docx, *.xlsx, *.odf, etc.) can now be configured.
• Preferences, File Formats: Option to configure the extensions of file masks that determine which conversion filter will be used for which files.
• Preferences, File Formats: Option to disable specific conversion filters (PDF, Word, Excel).
• Preferences, File Formats: Option to specify a folder where converted PDF, Word and Excel files should be cached, along with a maximum size of the cache. Using the cache speeds up searching through PDF, Word and Excel files that were previously searched through with PowerGREP. The cache is shared between all running instances of PowerGREP.
• Regex: Character class subtraction, as supported by XML schema and the .NET framework.
• Regex: Free-spacing regex search type and (?x:) free-spacing mode modifier.
• Regex: POSIX character classes.
• Regex: \Q..\E escape sequence for escaping a string of metacharacters.
• Regex: \cA through \cZ ASCII control characters Ctrl+A through Ctrl+Z; equivalent of \x01 through \x1A; can be used inside and outside character classes.
• Regex: \p{Arabic} through \p{Yi} tokens for matching any character in a particular Unicode script; \p{IsArabic} syntax also supported.
• Regex: \p{InBasicLatin} through \p{InSpecials} tokens for matching any character in a particular Unicode block; \p{IsBasicLatin} and \p{BasicLatin} alternatives also supported; BasicLatin can also be written as Basic_Latin, Basic-Latin and Basic Latin.
• Results: "Totals" option to show the number of matches per file and the clickable file header on one line. This halves the number of lines needed when not showing match details (e.g. after a "quick execute"), and leaves the total visible when collapsing file nodes.
• Results: "Totals" option to show totals both at the top and the bottom.

Improvements:

• Command line: More accurate and explanatory error messages when using invalid command line parameters.
• EditPad: When PowerGREP is run from a removable drive, check if there's a copy of EditPad on the same drive, and use that.
• File Formats: *.xlsx and *.pptx extensions are now also recognized as Office Open XML Files.
• File sectioning: The "do not section; count lines" option should not count lines in files that are detected as binary, and behave like "do not section" for those files.
• Preferences, File Selection: Changed the labels of the radio buttons for remembering the file selection and action to make their function more obvious; their actual function has not changed.
• Regex: \xFF now matches the specified 8-bit value when searching through a file using an 8-bit encoding. When searching through other files, \xFF is equivalent to \u00FF like in previous versions (3.x.x).
• RegexBuddy: When PowerGREP is run from a removable drive, check if there's a copy of RegexBuddy on the same drive, and use that.
• RegexBuddy: When the search type is a list of regular expressions, send all of them to RegexBuddy, and retrieve all of them back from RegexBuddy. This requires RegexBuddy 3.
• Results: If the results options are changed because an action that groups matches is run, reset the options when an action that does not group matches is run.
• Undo History: Multi-select actions to undo/delete them all at once.

Bug fixes:

• Action: Group placeholders like %GROUP1:40L% in the replacement text ignored the padding option.
• Action: PowerGREP would sometimes complain about invalid backup options when the target type was set to not save anything (and thus no backups are needed).
• Action: Target file destination type "folder tree" failed to create subfolders in the target folder (3.3.3 only).
• File formats: PowerGREP would hang with 100% CPU usage when trying to decode certain Excel files.
• Regex: Redesigned internal backtracking system, to support repeated backtracking of groups nested inside other groups.
• Undo History: Undoing a "find files" action that moved files caused the moved files to be deleted instead of moved back to their previous locations. This fix will only work for actions executed with PowerGREP 3.4.0 or later. Previous versions of PowerGREP did not store the location of the original file in the Undo History.
• Undo Manager: Changes to files in newly added undoable actions were not tracked right away.

Documentation additions:

• Example: Padding and unpadding .CSV files.
• Example: Replace reserved characters in XML files.

PowerGREP 3.3.3 - 19 April 2007

Improvements:

• PowerGREP now closes much faster.
• Preferences, File Selector: Permanent exclusion file masks can now contain backslashes. Such masks will be applied to the full path of the file, allowing certain folders or certain files in certain folders to be permanently excluded. E.g. *\duplicates\* will exclude everything inside all folders called "duplicates".
• Prevent the computer from going to sleep if PowerGREP is still busy executing an action. Gracefully abort the action if the computer is forced to go to sleep (e.g. low battery on a laptop).

Bug fixes:

• Action: No files would be found if the "action type" was "find files", "search type" was "list of literal text", "non-overlapping search" turned on, "list only files matching all items" turned on and "file sectioning" set to "do not section".
• Action: Target file destination type "folder tree" failed to create target files for files inside .zip archives.
• Action: The "folder tree" backup option did not work properly (3.3.x only).
• File Formats: Password-protected Excel files caused a harmless access violation error to appear in the results. PowerGREP still skipped the file as it should, it just didn't show the correct message in the results.
• File Selector: Changes in files in a drive's root folder were not automatically picked up when collapsing and re-expanding its node in the File Selector or starting the search.
• Files with invalid date stamps (i.e. without a date stamp in Windows Explorer) would cause a date encoding error if PowerGREP had to modify the file, causing the action to fail.
• PowerGREP would get stuck on an error message when you tried to close it when running PowerGREP from a write-protected removable device.
• Preferences, Action & Results: The option to preserve file dates now also works for target files inside .zip archives.
• Preferences, Encoding: When processing a Unicode file without a byte order marker, the target file sometimes used the default encoding rather than the auto-detected Unicode encoding of the source file.
• Preferences, File Selector: Permanent exclusion file masks are now also applied to files inside .zip archives.
• Searching through .zip files sometimes caused an unexpected access denied error.
• Vista: Checkboxes and buttons in dialog boxes like the Preferences screen no longer disappear when you press the Alt key.
• Vista: Folder context menus didn't show up in Vista.
• Zip archives inside other .zip archives were recompressed after being searched through, even if the nested .zip archive wasn't modified.

PowerGREP 3.3.2 - 14 December 2006

Improvements:

• Files with the .wpd extension are now also decoded as WordPerfect files, in addition to .wp, .wp4, .wp5 and .wp6 files.
• Help|Install on Removable Drive: Option to force PowerGREP to treat any drive as a removable drive.
• Regex: Regular expressions starting with a non-alternated caret are now applied much faster than in previous versions of PowerGREP.
• Vista: Installing syntax coloring schemes now works properly under Windows Vista with User Account Control enabled.

Bug fixes:

• Action: If the backup file naming style was set to "path placeholders" and the backup file location started with a path placeholder instead of a drive letter, PowerGREP would falsely complain the backup path is invalid.
• If a file in a proprietary file format was searched through, then modified in another application, and searched through again during the same PowerGREP session, PowerGREP searched its old cached copy of the decoded file instead of the modified file.
• Preferences, Encoding: Up and Down buttons did not work.
• Regex: The upper limit on a lazy quantifier {m,n}? was not respected; e.g. a{1,3}b would match aaaaab entirely.
• Windows won't shut down while PowerGREP is running (3.3.x only).

PowerGREP 3.3.1 - 6 September 2006

Improvements:

• Command Line: Show an error message when unrecognized command line switches are used.

Bug fixes:

• Files with .xls extensions that weren't Excel files at all caused PowerGREP to freeze. Now, such files will be flagged as not being Excel files and skipped.
• Regex: A regex starting with a word boundary caused an access violation when attempted on an empty file. (Starting with version 3.3.0, PowerGREP no longer skips empty files when the "file sectioning" option is set to "do not section".)
• Undo History: Actions that overwrote files without creating backups caused a harmless access violation until the undo manager updated the undo history (version 3.3.0 only).

PowerGREP 3.3.0 - 18 August 2006

New features:

• Action: Import File command on the right-click menu of all text boxes, to easily load the contents of a file as the search term. Useful for quickly loading delimited lists.
• Archives: .jar (Java Archive), .ear (Java Enterprise Application Packaging unit) and .war (Java web archive) archives can now be searched through when the Search through Archives option in the File Selector menu is enabled. These archives are essentially .zip archives with an extra META-INF folder with files containing meta information about the files in the archive. PowerGREP treats these archives as .zip archives, without any special treatment for the META-INF folder.
• Command line: /resultsoptions parameter for the options on the Results pane.
• File Formats: Microsoft Office Open XML (*.docx) and XML Paper Specification files can now be searched (and replaced) through. DOCX and XPS files are essentially ZIP archives containing several XML files. PowerGREP cannot decode DOCX and XPS files, but lets you search through the raw XML. PowerGREP can also make replacements in DOCX and XPS files, though you'll have to be careful not to mess up the XML structure.
• File Formats: OpenDocument Format files can now be searched (and replaced) through. ODF files are essentially ZIP archives containing several XML files. PowerGREP cannot decode ODF files, but lets you search through the raw XML. PowerGREP can also make replacements in ODF files, though you'll have to be careful not to mess up the XML structure.
• Placeholders: Placeholders to insert section and match numbers and the section and match text.
• Preferences, Action & Results: Default backup options. New actions will default to these backup settings. The Editor will always use these settings.
• Preferences, Action and Results: Option to collapse files by default when showing matches grouped per file
• Preferences, Editor: Option to make an editor the default editor for the file types it supports. Pressing Ctrl+E will then open the files in that editor instead of opening them in PowerGREP.
• Results: Option to sort files by their last modification dates.
• Sectioning: "line by line (include line breaks)" sectioning type that includes the line break after each line in the section. This sectioning mode makes it easy to delete matching lines by running a search-and-replace that replaces whole sections with nothing.
• Undo History: The built-in editor now creates backup copies, and adds them to the undo history for easy undoing or cleanup.

Improvements:

• Action: History list for search terms now also indicate the replacement text. Previously, the history items did save and restore the replacement text, but did not indicate it in the menu.
• Action: PowerGREP no longer skips empty files when the sectioning type is set to "whole file". It still skips them when sectioning files, since an empty file has no sections. A regular expression like \A or \z is useful to prepend or append something to the start or end of all files, while ^ and $ all by themselves are useful to prepend or append something to the start or end of all lines in all files. Such regular expressions will now insert the replacement text once in empty files in search-and-replace actions.
• Action: PowerGREP now aborts instantly when the Abort button is clicked, even when searching through a huge file without any search matches.
• Archives: PowerGREP will now search through archives stored inside other archives. Previously, archives inside archives were treated as binary files rather than archives.
• Archives: PowerGREP's built-in editor can now edit and save files inside zip archives. Only files that were opened from an archive can be saved back into that archive under the same name. When saving a file under a new name, the file cannot be saved into an archive.
• Install on Removable Drive: The undo history can now be copied over to the removable drive.
• Preferences, Editor: %LINE% and %COL% can be used on the command line when sections are indicated with line numbers. The "do not section; count line numbers" and "line by line" sectioning types use line numbers as section numbers. The first line and column have line and column number one. For all other sectioning types, %LINE% and %COL% will be substituted with zero.
• Preferences, Encoding: Option to detect UTF-8 as well as UTF-16 files without a byte order marker.
• Preferences, Encoding: Option to make writing the Unicode byte order marker optional.
• Regex: Individual linear expansion of greedy tokens such as .* now uses considerably less memory when dealing with very large regex matches (100,000+ characters). This improvement makes the regular expression engine expand .* faster but backtrack slower. The net result is a speed gain if the .* needs to backtrack less than half the number of characters it first matched.
• Regex: Individual linear expansion of lazy tokens such as .*? no longer counts towards the "catastrophic backtracking" prevention. This allows regular expressions to use .*? and similar tokens to find matches longer than 500,000 characters. As a trade-off, it will take PowerGREP much longer to detect catastrophic backtracking due to improper use of .*? as happens when start.*?middle.?end is applied with "dot matches newlines" to a huge files containing many occurrences of "start" and "middle" but none of "end".
• Reopen menus and path history now show longer path names.
• Results: If the action was aborted due to the catastrophic backtracking warning, the error message now indicates the file on which the error occurred. It is possible for a regular expression to show exponential behavior on only some files. Usually, these are files in which the regular expression matches partially at certain positions, but cannot find a complete match.
• Results: Opening all files with results in EditPad Pro now automatically makes EditPad Pro select the first search match in each file.
• Undo History: Detect the status of backup files in the background, instead of when starting PowerGREP and when switching from another application to PowerGREP.
• Undo History: If the undo history references files on drives or network shares that are unavailable, mark those files as "drive not available" rather than as being deleted.

Bug fixes:

• Action: Clicking Replace (as opposed to Quick Replace) for a search-and-replace action with a list of regular expressions and non-overlapping search turned on and file sectioning turned on caused PowerGREP to use and leak an unreasonable amount of memory. Memory usage is now a lot more reasonable in this situation (similar to when file sectioning is off), and memory will be released when you select Results|Clear in the menu.
• Action: The action fails with an access violation if the backup file location is not a complete path when the backup destination type is "single folder". Now PowerGREP will show a proper message and will refuse to run the action.
• File Selector: Typing extraneous trailing spaces into the Path field no longer causes empty nodes to be added to the folder tree.
• File Selector: When the modification date option was set to "(not) modified during the past X hours/days/etc", the number of hours/days/etc was not saved.
• Placeholders: When searching for a regular expression, placeholders in the text to be collected or the replacement text were not recognized unless they appeared at the start or after a \, $ or backreference.
• Regex: If the regular expression started with a literal character repeated a fixed number of times with the {n} operator, followed by another literal character, RegexBuddy incorrectly expanded the quantifier when applying the "literal start" optimization. E.g. a{2}b would fail to match aab while \w{2}b, a{2}\w and a{2,3}b all matched properly.
• Regex: Negative lookaround containing nothing except one of the anchors ^, $, \A, \z or \Z would match at any position, while it should fail at positions where the anchor matches.
• Regex: PowerGREP did not backtrack repeated atomic groups. E.g. (?>[ab])+b did not match aab. PowerGREP incorrectly treated (?>group)+ as (group)++. In (?>group)+ the regex won't backtrack into the group, but will backtrack +. In (group)++ neither the group nor the + are backtracked. The equivalent of (group)++ using atomic grouping notation is (?>(group)+).
• Regex: Zero-width match bump-along also needs to happen if a zero-width match if found at the position where the previous match ended.
• Results: Search-and-replace and collect actions resulting in individual replacements larger than 64K were not handled properly, either resulting in truncated replacements or an access violation.
• Results|Print, Edit|Print: Trying to print long results or certain files got PowerGREP stuck on a "list index out of bounds" error.
• Undo History: If PowerGREP wasn't able to save the undo history due to it having remembered a now invalid path, PowerGREP would throw error messages without giving the opportunity to select another undo history file.

New examples in the help file and manual:

• Capitalize the first letter of each word.
• Collect a numbered list.
• Collect paragraphs, where a paragraph is a block of lines delimited by one or more blank lines.
• Find files NOT containing a search term.
• Insert line numbers into the file.
• Padding replacements.
• Search through the printable content in Word .docx, XML Paper Specification and OpenDocument Format files.

PowerGREP 3.2.2 - 24 February 2006

Bug fixes:

• Action: A collect data action saving the results into a single target file would fail to save the target file, triggering an access violoation error at the end of the search (version 3.2.1 only).
• Scroll bars did not appear on the File Selector and Action panes when they were made too small to show all their contents (version 3.2.1 only).
• Regex: Conditionals without an "else" alternative would fail if the conditional test failed. Since an empty regex always matches, the conditional should match if the "else" part is omitted or empty.
• Regex: Groups with an empty alternative at the end were not made optional, i.e. (a|b|) was treated as (a|b) instead of (a|b)?
• Sectioning: If the sectioning type was set to "search and collect sections", and "section collect" was set to a backreference to a non-existing capturing group, an access violation would occur.
• Undo History: Actions that created some files and overwrote others were marked as partially undoable instead of not undoable at all if all the created files and all the backup copies of the modified files were deleted.

PowerGREP 3.2.1 - 31 January 2006

New features:

• Help|Install on Removable Drive

Improvements:

• Action: "Copy/move/delete matching files" target types for "find files" actions now also work on files inside .zip archives.
• Action: Drop-down lists for delimiters, target location and backup location now show a history of recently used delimiters and target/backup locations.
• Action: The option "list only sections matching all items" no longer requires the "collect/replace whole sections" option to be turned on for "search-and-replace" actions.
• File Selector: Network drives that are mapped to a drive letter are now indicated with the mapped UNC path rather than the mapped drive's volume label. This change is purely cosmetic.
• Results: Don't display matches with fewer than the "minimum number of occurrences" specified in the action when automatically updating the results during the search (i.e. when it is not yet known if a match will reach the minimum number in the end or not).
• Undo History: If trying to open another undo history file fails, the error message now offers an option to revert to the previous undo history in addition to picking another history or retrying.

Bug fixes:

• Action: In a search-and-replace action using a list of search terms, with file sectioning enabled (not set to "whole file"), with non-overlapping search disabled, an access violation error occurred if two search terms matched in the same section.
• Action: In a search-and-replace action, with file sectioning enabled (not set to "whole file"), if the last match to be replaced was at the very end of the file, the last match's text would be copied into the target file after the last match's replacement.
• Action: Loading a search-and-replace action using a list of binary data from a .pga file or library failed with an access violation.
• Action: Search-and-replace actions with both "replace whole sections" and "list only sections matching all items" turned on in the file sectioning did not work properly.
• Collect: Editing the file with the collected data messed up the highlighting of the collected matches in the editor.
• Command line: When two files are specified right next to each other, PowerGREP concatenated the file names instead of opening both files.
• Editor: On a few computers, PowerGREP would lock up when opening a file larger than 64K in the editor by double-clicking on a result in the Results pane.
• Opening a .pga PowerGREP action file or a .pgf PowerGREP file selection file saved with PowerGREP 2 caused PowerGREP 3 to keep a lock on the file until you closed PowerGREP 3, making it impossible to overwrite the file.
• Regex: If a single token was repeated and also made optional in a group all by itself, e.g. (a{3})?, PowerGREP incorrectly optimized the token as a{0,3}.
• Regex: Initial lookbehind optimization caused regexes with a capturing group inside the initial lookbehind to fail if the capturing group was referenced later in the regular expression.
• Regex: Octal escapes like \037 were not handled properly
• Regex: PowerGREP's regular expression optimizer incorrectly made greedy tokens followed by lookbehind possessive, if the characters matched by the token and the lookbehind are mutually exclusive.
• Results: Closing the Results pane after floating it no longer causes PowerGREP to crash (3.2.0 only)
• Results: If the Automatic Update item in the Results menu was activated, PowerGREP would not list all skipped binary files if the action did not produce any other errors. Binary files are skipped when the Search Binary Files item in the File Selector menu is disabled. Skipped binary files are indicated in the results if that option is checked on the Action & Results tab in the Preferences.
• Results: When saving search results that contained error messages into a .pgr file using Results|Save, PowerGREP would incorrectly claim the .pgr file is invalid when opening it with Results|Open.
• Undo History: File names with ampersands and angle brackets in them were incorrectly saved into the undo history, causing PowerGREP to report an error the next time it tried to open the undo history.

PowerGREP 3.2.0 - 3 October 2005

New features:

• Preferences, File Selection: Option to disable auto-detecting network servers and shares when expanding the Network node in the File Selector. When disabled, network shares can be searched by typing in their UNC paths. If your PC is connected to a large network, you can disable this option if you don't want a long list of network servers to clutter the File Selector.
• Preferences, File Selection: Option to remember the File Selection and Action files that were in use, as an alternative to remember the file selection and action ("search terms") themselves. That option was moved from the Appearance tab to the new File Selector tab.
• Windows Explorer context menu for folders now has an additional "search subfolders with PowerGREP" item to start PowerGREP with the folder marked with a double tick.

Improvements:

• File Selector: Expanding a folder containing thousands of files that were already searched through no longer incurs a noticeable delay. The File Selector will overall feel a lot snappier now.
• File Selector: Indicate volume labels next to drive letters.
• Results: When activating the Results pane when results are listed, the edit box with the results instead of the Display drop-down list will now have keyboard focus. This makes it easy to keep track of where you were in the results.
• Results: When choosing a display option that doesn't work in combination with other options (e.g. show context while grouping matches), automatically change the other options to make the selected option possible.
• Results: When choosing a display option that is not possible (e.g. showing context when none was saved), show an explanation in the PowerGREP Assistant.
• Regex: Empty alternatives in the main regex are now treated as an error. They will always find a zero-width match, effectively truncating the regular expression at that point. This is usually a typing error rather than the user's intention.
• Windows Explorer context menu item "search with PowerGREP" now keeps the file masks and date settings in the File Selector when the option to remember search terms between sessions is on. Any remembered file and folder markings are cleared.

Bug fixes:

• Action: Extra processing (any kind) caused an access violation if the main search-and-replace used literal text.
• Action: Extra processing and file sectioning search terms were added to the history of the main action, rather than the extra processing and file sectioning histories. Histories can be accessed by clicking the black downward pointing triangle next to the Search labels in the main part of the action, the extra processing part and the file sectioning part.
• Action: Extra processing using a regular expression that matches the extra processing replacement text caused PowerGREP to get stuck in an infinite loop.
• Action: Extra processing with the extra processing replacement left blank and the extra processing search type set to regular expression, caused an access violation.
• Action: Repeating a find files action twice after deleting a previously found file would, under some circumstances, list the deleted file among the results again.
• Action: If the search type was a (delimited) list of regular expressions, and one of the regexes had more opening than closing brackets when clicking the Preview or Execute button, the error message would reappear each time, even after correcting the regex.
• Action: The "search" box was not properly positioned when the search type was a list, on systems using large fonts.
• Action: When the option to preserve search terms was off, and PowerGREP was closed with the search type set to "search and replace" or "collect data", the Execute and Quick Execute buttons would incorrectly preserve the "Replace" or "Collect" label the next time PowerGREP was started, until the search type was changed. This issue was purely cosmetic.
• File Selector: Expanding the Network node caused PowerGREP to become unresponsive on systems running Windows XP SP2 with the Windows firewall enabled, if the network was very large.
• File Selector: Loading a file selection with an invisible default network share marked (e.g. \\server\c$), would incorrectly show the share with a recycle bin icon indicating it doesn't exist.
• Regex: (?:a|b|c)|d|e was optimized into a|d|e|b|c instead of a|b|c|d|e which would cause the wrong alternative to match if more than one could be matched at the same position
• Regex: A group with an empty alternative such as (|a|b) caused an access violation
• Docking 2 panes together did not preserve their relative sizes when restarting PowerGREP.
• If PowerGREP was previously used on the second monitor, and is then run again with only one monitor available, PowerGREP will be displayed entirely off-screen.
• When saving a file selection with a folder recursively marked, and a subfolder of it excluded, the exclusion mark is not saved into the file selection (version 3.1.0 only).
• Copying and pasting from PowerGREP into another application did not work on Windows 95, 98 and ME (versions 3.x.x only).

More documentation:

• Example: Find two or more words on the same line.
• Example: Find two words separated by a certain number (min, max) of other words.

PowerGREP 3.1.0 - 16 July 2005

New features:

• Action: Before searching a file, PowerGREP will now check if it starts with an XML declaration. If so, it will use the encoding indicated by the XML declaration. The XML header check can be disabled on the Text Encoding page in the Preferences.
• File Selector and Results: The submenu of Edit File now has an item to explore the folder containing the file. If a folder is selected, Edit File explores the folder.
• File Selector: Clear Folder and its Files and Subfolders: Clear the markings of the selected folder, and all files and subfolders in that folder.
• File Selector: Replaced the "Use Files with Search Results" item with "Mark Files with Search Results" and Search Only through Files with Results".
  The "mark" option works like the old "use" option. It clears the file selection, and then marks the files that have search results.
  The "only" option does not change the file selection, but restricts the search to files that are both marked in the file selector and listed in the results.
• Sectioning: Option to match only sections in which all search terms from the main part of the action can be matched.

Improvements:

• Action: Search terms can now be labeled when the search type is a list
• Action: The Execute and Quick Execute buttons on the Action toolbar now change their label to indicate what will happen, depending on the action type and target type settings.
  "Search" indicates a safe action that will not modify any files. "Collect", "Replace", "Move Files", "Copy Files" and "Delete Files" all indicate actions that will create and/or overwrite files.
• Action: The option to show only files in which all search terms can be found is now also available when the action type is "display search matches"
• File Selector: The "Open File in EditPad" menu item is now also enabled for folders, causing EditPad Pro to ask you if you want to open all files in the folder, or only files of a certain kind.
• File Selector: The list of network servers is now built in the background, so there's no long wait when expanding the Network node

Bug fixes:

• Action: A "find files" action without a search text and with the option to search archives turned off would list archive files that were modified outside the date range specified in the File Selector.
  When the option to search archives is off, "find files" actions without a search text treat .zip files as regular files rather than as compressed folders. All other actions skip .zip files when the option to search archives is off.
• Action: Executing (not previewing) a "display search matches" action after executing a "collect data" or "find files" action with the "target file creation" option set to "single file" caused an access violation.
• Action: If the search type was set to a list (e.g. "list of regular expressions") and only one item was added to the list, PowerGREP would refuse to run the action, incorrectly stating that the search text was left blank.
• Action: Search-and-replace actions with the replacement text left blank and the file sectioning set to anything except "whole file" caused an access violation error.
• Action: When encountering a password-portected Excel file, PowerGREP would pop up an error and abort the search instead of continuing the search, skipping the file and listing the error in the results.
• Docking 2 panes together in a single tab made it impossible to activate either using the View menu.
• File Selector: If the File Selector remembered markings for files on a removable drive that was disconnected, clearing the file selection caused an error.
• File Selector: Opening a file selection or action file with files or folders on the network marked in the file selection or action file caused an error.
• File Selector: When starting a search with some files or folders excluded, but none marked for inclusion, PowerGREP did not show the error that no files are marked for inclusion.
• Files encoded in UTF-8 that contain non-ASCII characters were not handled properly by regular expression constructs that search backwards such as the caret and lookbehind.
• Files encoded with code pages 932 (Japanese), 936 (simplified Chinese), 949 (Korean) or 950 (traditional Chinese) were not properly processed when searching or editing.
• Find files: Executing a find files action with the target type set to copy or move files, and the option to search archives OFF, caused the action to be aborted with an "invalid typecast" error.
• Regex: Alternation inside capturing groups did not always work properly, e.g. Z([ui]|ue)rich did not match Zuerich. This problem did not occur with non-capturing groups, e.g. Z(?:[ui]|ue)rich worked properly.
• Regex: Due to an over-optimization, (a?) was treated like (a)? where "a" is a single regex token. The difference is that if "a" cannot be matched, \1 will successfully match (nothing) in the first case, but fail to match in the second case.
• Results: Right-clicking on the bottom part of the results pane with error messages or match details and selecting the "copy" or "select all" items, copied or selected the text in the main results rather than the errors/details part.
• Sectioning: When splitting files along delimiters, PowerGREP did not search the part of each file between the last delimiter in the file and the very end of the file.
• Undo History: The prompt to select a new undo history file when the active undo history file cannot be read did not work.

New Examples:

• Extract or delete lines matching one or more strings or regular expressions.
• Save search matches into a CSV file.

PowerGREP 3.0.4 - 18 May 2005

Bug fixes:

• Action: History items persisted but became inoperative after restarting PowerGREP.
• Action: Previewing or executing a "collect data" action with the search type set to "regular expression", and some literal text entered as the search term, and a backreference used in the replacement text, would cause an access violation. Note that when searching for literal text with the search type set to "regular expression", using backreferences is pointless since there are no capturing groups.
• Action: Search through files that another application is writing to, such as log files (was possible in PowerGREP 2.x).
• Edit File submenu in the File Selector and Results menus did not show the Open item with the application associated with the file type if the file association lacked quotes around the path to the application, if that path contained spaces (e.g. "C:\Program Files\app.exe").
• Editor: Intermittent access violations occurred when scrolling through files when the option to show line numbers was on.
• File Selector: (Windows NT, 2000, XP and 2003 only) Under certain circumstances, PowerGREP would stop processing directory change notifications, causing both the File Selector and the actual grep operation to ignore new files until PowerGREP was restarted.
• File Selector: Marking a folder without its subfolders, without expanding the folder in the File Selector, and then running the search, then expanding the folder in the File Selector, did not show the folder's subfolders.
• File Selector: Typing in a UNC path now properly adds the server and share to the network node in the files and folders tree, even if the server is not on the same domain or workgroup as the local computer.
• Preferences, Operation: PowerGREP did not refresh its list of files and folders in the File Selector after changing the list of files to be excluded from all actions in the Preferences, effectively requiring a restart for the change to take effect.

PowerGREP 3.0.3 - 26 April 2005

New features:

• Histories for search terms, extra processing and file sectioning on the Action pane, and the path and file masks in the File Selector.

Improvements:

• Command line: Relative paths and file:// URLs are now supported.
• Command line: The second value for /save to indicate the encoding to save the results with is now optional.
• File Selector: Folder and file information is now cached, noticeably increasing the speed of the File Selector, and eliminating the globbing phase for the second and following action executed on the same file selection. (Windows NT, 2000, XP and 2003 only)
• File Selector: Files and folders with the "system" attribute set were always invisible. Now, they will be visible when the option to search through hidden files is on in the Operation Preferences.
• File Selector: When typing a path into the Path field, the files and folders tree is now automatically expanded. Press Arrow Up and Arrow Down to navigate through the tree while keeping keyboard focus on the Path field.

Bug fixes:

• Conversion cache for MS Word, Excel and PDF files did not keep the cached copies in certain circumstances.
• PowerGREP did not remember its layout when one or more panes were made to float (e.g. by selecting the dual monitor layout in the View menu).

PowerGREP 3.0.2 - 16 April 2005

Improvements:

• Action: Search-and-replace actions that make large numbers of replacements are now executed much faster compared with PowerGREP 3.0.x. Remember to use Quick Execute to execute such actions for maximum speed.
• File Selector: Browsing files and folders on a network share should be slightly faster now
• File Selector: When typing in a UNC path in the Path field, make the network share visible in the File Selector as long as it exists, even if the network server cannot be browsed
• Results: Printing the results now prints the action definition before the results, like PowerGREP 1 and 2 do.
• Results: When certain files were skipped because they are binary, inform that binary files can be search through by turning on the option "search binary files" in the File Selector menu.

Version 3.0.x bugs fixed:

• Action: Keyboard shortcuts Ctrl+Z/X/C/V/A did not work for drop-down lists
• Action: Search-and-replace actions using a list of three or more search-and-replace pairs with the non-overlapping search option turned off would fail with a "file in use" error and leave the temporary files behind.
• Action Search-and-replace on Unicode files starting with a byte order marker resulted in target files with two byte order markers, and all replacements inserted two or three bytes shifted from the correct position.
• Action: Unicode files were sometimes incorrectly flagged as binary files.
• Dragging a docked or tabbed pane to the top of the screen to make it float no longer makes the caption bar of the floating pane invisible
• Zip files: Trying to search through .zip files compressed with WinZip's new "enhanced compression" resulted in an popup error message for each file in the .zip. Now, PowerGREP will list the errors in the results without interruption.

PowerGREP 3.0.1 - 8 April 2005

PowerGREP 3.0 is a major upgrade. This version introduces many new features and significant enhancements, along with a completely redesigned interface. Migrating from PowerGREP 2.x to 3.0 will take a bit of getting used to. The PowerGREP 3.0 migration guide explains the most important differences.

Once you've made the move from PowerGREP 2.x to 3.0, you will find this new version a far superior and more capable tool. When it comes to power and flexibility, PowerGREP 3.0 stands head and shoulders above all other Windows grep tools.

That doesn't make PowerGREP 3.0 more difficult to use than previous version. Quite to the contrary, in fact. When you take advantage of the new file sectioning and extra processing features, you'll often be able to use much simpler regular expressions in PowerGREP 3.0 than in previous versions of PowerGREP (or any other grep tool, for that matter).

All-new file selector:

• File selector is now a pane in the main window, rather than a pop up.
• Include and exclude individual files, folders and archives on your PC or network.
• Use different inclusion and exclusion file masks for each folder.
• Indicates which files contain search matches, and enables subsequent actions to be limited to those files.
• Limit the search for a date/time range of the modification date of a file.

Actions with more power and flexibility:

• Search through files larger than 2 GB. New limit is 9 EB or 9 billion GB (2^63 bytes).
• Search through Excel files (*.xls).
• Multiple search terms or search-and-replace pairs: paste in an arbitrary set of search term, regexes or replacement pairs, with custom delimiters. Search for all items concurrently (non-overlapping search) or sequentially.
• Sequence action was removed. All action types can now work with multiple regular expressions. You can enter sequence steps individually (like in the past), or all together in one edit box with custom delimiters.
• Extra processing: Search and replace through the replacement text or the text to be collected after each search match.
• Sections: Define sections or split boundaries to restrict search matches to certain sections, and/or to collect the context of search matches.
• Move, copy or delete the files that are found during a "find files" action.
• Invert Results: List files, lines or sections NOT matching the search text.
• Collect search matches into target files, with one target file for the whole action, or individual target files for each source file.
• Path placeholders can now be used in the search text or regular expression, in addition to the replacement text.
• Easy way to insert path placeholders, without having to remember the actual tokens.
• Comments in PowerGREP actions explaining what the action is all about.
• Executing a PowerGREP action now takes place entirely in the background. PowerGREP's user interface remains fully responsive during the search, enabling you to fully inspect the results gathered so far while the operation continues.

Improved regular expression engine:

• Unicode regex tokens \p{property}, \P{property}, \uFFFF and \X are now supported.
• MBCS (multi-byte character set): PowerGREP's regular expression engine now treats multi-byte characters as single characters, making PowerGREP usable with languages such as Japanese, Chinese and Korean, whether working with Unicode files or not.
• Multiple named capturing groups can now have the same name.
• PowerGREP will no longer crash in case of "catastrophic backtracking" caused by a regular expression that is too complex. When PowerGREP detects catastrophic backtracking, it will abort the action and show an error message.

More informative results:

• Results: Show/hide match context, group/ungroup and sort search matches in the results, without performing the search again.
• Results: When results are grouped per file, the files and their results can now be collapsed like folders in a tree view.

All-new built-in file editor:

• Basic text & hex editor with highlighted search matches
• Step through search matches.
• Make/undo individual replacements after previewing or executing a search-and-replace.
• Print file or selected block with search matches highlighted.

All-new PowerGREP library:

• Save multiple PowerGREP actions into a single file, for easy access and reuse.
• Instantly search the captions and descriptions of all actions in a library.
• Example actions are now included with PowerGREP as a PowerGREP library, including a significant number of brand new examples.

More configuration options:

• Option to give target files the same file date as the original files when doing a search and replace.
• Option to list file names in the results as relative to the search path instead of with absolute paths.
• Option to make PowerGREP start with the last file selection and action, or to start with a blank action and file selection.
• Option to specify default character encodings for files matching specific file masks, and the option to turn off automatic detection of Unicode files.

Other improvements:

• Caption shows the file name of the last opened/saved file selection, action, results, library, sequence and editor file.
• Double-clicking on a regular expression selects the entire regex token that was clicked on, rather than the entire word. (e.g. \bword\b highlights \b or word, rather than bword)
• File types: Known backup extensions are ignored when determining the file type. E.g. myfile.html.bak should be treated as a .html file (unless a .bak file type has been defined).
• The text version of decoded proprietary file formats (i.e. PDF and Word documents) is now saved during a PowerGREP session. When you search through the same file more than once, it will need to be decoded only once, speeding up the search.
• Treat \t, \r and \n as regex tokens in the replacement text, when using regular expressions.
• Unicode files: When PowerGREP encounters NULL characters in a file, it now first tries to determine if the file is a Unicode file without a byte order marker, before deciding the file is a binary file.
• XML-based file formats for all files saved by PowerGREP.

PowerGREP 2.3.3 - 18 May 2005

Improvements:

• Files and folders with the "system" attribute set were never searched through. Now, they will be visible when the option to search through hidden files is on in the Operation Preferences.

Bug fixes:

• Command line parameter /target 1 0 c:\folder was not processed properly if the second number after /target was 0. The folder was not being used as the target folder, but interpreted as the name of a file to be opened.
• File viewer Open and Edit buttons were grayed out if the file association for the file you have open lacked double quotes around the path to the application, if that path contains spaces (i.e. "Program Files")
• \k .NET-style named backreferences did not work.

PowerGREP 2.3.2 - 18 October 2004

New features:

• You can now use if-then-else conditionals in regular expressions.

Bug fixes:

• Sequence: Newly added steps no longer take over the name field from the subsequent step.
• Replace: Files stored in folders inside a zip archive were not properly updated. The updated file was stored in the root of the archive rather than in its folder inside the archive.
• Preferences, Results and Files: Box to select a different "My Documents" folder was invisible (2.3.1 only).
• Files that have the .zip extension but are not valid .zip archives are now ignored when the option "search archives" is on. Previously, they caused the search to fail.
• Files that can be opened but cannot be read due to locking (I/O error 33) or other errors no longer cause the search to be aborted. The error will be reported and the file will be skipped.
• PowerGREP would crash with an access violation or a pointer error when a search match in a binary file spanned more than 8,000 bytes. Unlike many other grep tools, there is no arbitrary limit to the length of a search match in PowerGREP.

PowerGREP 2.3.1 - 14 June 2004

New features:

• You can now use named capturing groups and named backreferences in regular expressions. Both the .NET syntax and the Python syntax are supported. Named capturing groups are numbered along with unnamed capturing groups, like Python does.

Improvements:

• Command line: Double quotes inside command line parameters are no longer ignored. Specify two double quotes to include a single double quote into the search or replace text.
  To specify a search text of x"x, use this command line: PowerGREP /searchtext "x""x"
  Should you specify /searchtext "x"x" you will get an error saying the file x does not exist. The single double quote breaks up the command line parameter.
  To specify "test" as the search text, including the quotes, use: PowerGREP /searchtext """test"""

Bug fixes:

• Files stored in zip archives were not properly opened in external editors
• PDF files that are password-protected against being modified can now be searched through. Note that you cannot search through files that require a password to be read.
• Sequence Editor: Move Down caused an access violation when none of the steps was selected.
• Sequence Editor: Paging up and down with the scroll bar skipped one step.

PowerGREP 2.3.0 - 7 May 2004

New features:

• RegexBuddy integration
• Save Results: If you specify an extension other than .pga or .pgr, the results are now saved as a plain text file. The same is true for the /save command line parameter.
• PDF: Search through version 1.5 PDF files (i.e. created with Acrobat 6)

Improvement:

• Command line: /quit now works without /save when a replace or sequence action was executed. In other circumstances, /quit does not work without /save because the search results would be lost, making the whole exercise pointless.

Bug fix:

• "Open all files in EditPad" will no longer open files without matches (i.e. files with errors, or binary files that were skipped, etc.)

PowerGREP 2.2.0 - 4 March 2004

New features:

• Built-in syntax coloring for JavaScript/ECMAScript source code and for Visual Basic.NET source code.
• Regular Expressions: A modifier such as (?i) placed in the middle of the regular expression now only applies to the part of the regex to the right of it, rather than the entire regex.
• Regular Expressions: Possessive quantifiers are now supported.
• Regular Expressions: \G matches at the end of the previous match (or start of the file for the first match attempt)
• Regular Expressions: $1, $2, etc. are now interpreted as backreferences in the replacement text, in addition to \1, \2, ... To insert $1 as literal text, use either $$1 or \$1.
  To change the case of the backreference, you need to continue using \u1, etc. $u1 is interpreted as literal text.

Important change:

• Regular Expressions: Previously, the shorthand character class \s only matched a tab or a space. Now it matches a tab, a space, a carriage return (\r), a line feed (\n) or a form feed. This brings PowerGREP in line with most other regex flavors.

Bug fixes:

• Password-protected Microsoft Word documents crashed PowerGREP. Now, PowerGREP will add an error to the results noting that the password-protected file was skipped.
• Sequence: If a sequence had several steps that matched several times in a single paragraph, and the replacement consisted of more than one paragraph, access violations would occur.
• Searching for \n in a Windows text file, causes PowerGREP to report incorrect line numbers in the search results. Note that Windows text files use \r\n to terminate lines.

PowerGREP 2.1.0 - 2 January 2004

New features:

• Preferences, Operation: Option to search through hidden files and folders.

Improvements:

• Use double quotes in the Folder and File Mask fields to enclose folder names that have commas or semicolons in them.
• File Finder: When "search archives" is off, and there is no search text, zip files are now listed in the results if they match the file mask.

Bug fixes:

• Sequence pane was clipped at the bottom on systems using large fonts.
• When searching through zip archives and not all files in the archive matched the file mask, PowerGREP would search through the wrong files in the archive in certain situations.
• Collect: When grouping items separately per file, the same group may erroneously be displayed more than once.

PowerGREP 2.0.1 - 25 October 2003

Improvements:

• Backup files inside .zip archives now get the same time stamp as the original file. The time stamp is restored when undoing the action.

Bug fixes:

• Certain character combinations that get special treatment in MS Word are now properly converted (e.g. a double space is now converted into two spaces, rather than a cross symbol).
• File Selector: The "Folders" box word wrapped long folder paths with spaces in them, causing them to be broken up into two non-existent folders.
• PowerGREP 2.0.0 was unable to create backup files on Windows 95/98/ME unless the backup destination was a .zip archive. This problem did not occur on Windows NT4/2000/XP.

PowerGREP 2.0.0 - 16 October 2003

New features:

• Adaptive case option on the Replace page and in the Sequence editor to have the replace text adapt itself to the case of the search text. Replacing "cat" with "dog", should replace "Cat" with "Dog" and "CAT" with "DOG".
• Binary files that are being skipped are indicated as such in the results when the option "indicate skipped binary files" is on.
• Button showing a downward pointing triangle for each search/replace/collect box to access the context menu with the history list.
• Collect: "Minimum" option to exclude groups with fewer than X matches from the results. Only available when grouping and counting matches.
• Exclusion list in the Preferences with file masks to prevent files from ever being searched. This list is set to PowerGREP's backup file names by default, so by default PowerGREP 2 behaves like PowerGREP 1.
• File Finder page. Can apply regex to contents of the file, like search, but only reports if one match could be found, without searching for more. Search box may be left empty, to list all files corresponding to the file mask. Can report files in which the regex does NOT match (turn on "invert results"). Can create a folder+file mask to be used on the other pages based to search through only the files that are reported in the results (whether those results were created on the File Finder page or another page, or loaded from a previously saved PowerGREP Results File).
• File Selector: Easily build the file mask by hand-picking files and extensions to be searched through.
• File Selector: Load and save the list of files to be searched through.
• File masks: If you want to search through C:\Folder\Sub1\*.ext1 and C:\Folder\Sub2\*.ext2 you can do so by specifying the folder C:\Folder and the file mask Sub1\*.ext1 and Sub2\*.ext2. "Recurse subfolders" must be on.
• File masks: option to invert the file mask. E.g. when inverting the mask, *.doc;*.pdf will search through all files except Word Documents and PDF files.
• History lists for Open Action and Open Results now have a Maintain List item to edit the lists of files.
• Option to report backup files in the results.
• Option to visualize spaces, tabs and line breaks in the search boxes and/or the results and the file viewer.
• Path placeholders: String several placeholders together using backslashes or forward slashes. The slashes will only be added if there is actually anything to separate. Using forward slashes will also convert all backslashes to forward slashes.
• Preferences: Configurable limit to the number of matches to be listed per file on the Replace and Sequence pages.
• Preferences: Configurable tab size
• Preferences: Option to indicate the total number of matches above rather than below the results. This way, the total is indicated near the file header it pertains to, rather than near the next file header.
• Replace and Sequence: Create backups in a special backup folder so your important data folders don't get cluttered up with backup files, or to store backups into a .zip archive significantly reducing clutter and disk space usage but also decreasing speed.
• Replace and Sequence: You can now tell PowerGREP to make the replacements in a copy of the file searched through, rather than the file itself. This copy can be stored in a different folder or in a .zip archive.
• Replace, Collect, Sequence: Use backreference item in the context menu of the search box will insert the backreference inside which you placed the text cursor, into the replacement or collection text.
• Search through Microsoft Word documents.
• Search through PDF files.
• Sequence Editor: Allow steps to be named.
• Sequence: Add STEP: labels to the results, similar to FILE: labels. Indicate the step's name or its number if it's unnamed.
• Shift+Tab inserts a tab into the Search, Replace and Collect boxes.
• Syntax coloring: Built-in coloring schemes for XML and CSS.
• Undo history. Automatically save results with undo information into a history list, allowing PowerGREP actions to be intelligently undone even after other actions have been performed or after PowerGREP has been closed (and restarted).
• Whole words only option to replace the dot matches newline option when searching without regular expressions.

Improvements:

• File viewer: When using the Open, Edit or EditPad buttons for a file that is inside a .zip archive, the file is now extracted into the temp folder, and the application is instructed to open the temporary file.
• Remember the size of each page (search/replace/collect/sequence) separately; remember the size of the file viewer
• Replace and Sequence results: If the target file is not the same as the original file, double-clicking on a match will open the original file in the file viewer, and double-clicking a replacement will open the target file in the file viewer.
• Replace and Sequence: After 250,000 replacements have been reported in the results, PowerGREP will continue making replacements and only report the number of replacements made. This prevents "out of memory" errors, and greatly speeds up the operation.
• Search: The search will be aborted once 250,000 search matches have been found, to prevent "out of memory" errors. Since you are not going to review 250,000 search results anyway, you should perform searches that return a very large number of matches on the Collect page instead, and select to group and count items. This will give you meaningful statistics. The Collect page does not have predefined limits.