Howto search in PDFs using regular expressions?

Question

Usually I use Notepad++ to search in file(s) using regular expressions. Today I am wondering if there is a PDF program that does the same for PDFs. Of course I could convert the PDF to text and use Notepad++ but is there a more easy way without converting?

What OS are you using? – Scott McClenning Mar 15 '12 at 05:40 — Scott McClenning, Mar 15 '12 at 05:40
Windows Developer Preview and Windows 7 – Michael S. Mar 15 '12 at 05:41 — Michael S., Mar 15 '12 at 05:41

score 11 · Accepted Answer · edited Dec 11 '18 at 13:18

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several options:

Agent Ransack (top answer in Best way to *confidently* search files and contents in Windows without using an indexing service? )
DnGrep which is a Free and Open source software. Unfortunately it is at the moment only available on Windows. (a feature request has been opened for other platforms here)

edited Dec 11 '18 at 13:18

Foad

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answered Mar 15 '12 at 06:23

akira

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@akira What about in Linux? – Porcupine Aug 07 '18 at 01:25

minopret · Answer 2 · 2012-03-15T06:43:28.647

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Agent Ransack is free (lite) and supports PDF as its release notes confirm.
PowerGREP is a commercial product.

Just as you said, the evident alternative is to convert PDFs to text. One way for a programmer to set that up for bulk processing is by using the Python package PDFMiner. Agent Ransack uses "pdftotext" from the Xpdf project (and you can too).

edited Mar 15 '12 at 06:43

answered Mar 15 '12 at 06:23

minopret

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sidenote: Agent Ransack is the lite version of FileLocator – akira Mar 15 '12 at 06:28
Thanks! I looked more closely. The vendor's release notes confirm that File Locator Lite aka Agent Ransack does support PDF. Editing my answer. – minopret Mar 15 '12 at 06:41
Agent Ransack does the job. You might also want to try DnGrep. – Michael S. Mar 15 '12 at 08:08

Howto search in PDFs using regular expressions?

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