Find and Replace in Files - UTF8

Question

Searching for a free application for commercial usage that allows find/replace in multiple files (regular expressions are nice but not a must), that supports opening and saving in UTF-8.

Tried a few like BKReplaceEm but the application ends up saving all the files as ASCII which causes some problems with web-rendering.

Please advise.

[UPDATE] To further clarify, I am searching for a windows utility.

[UPDATE #2] This is going to be used to run through our 450 page site and replace all french characters with the much needed HTML entities.

Answer 1

Notepad++ supports this feature, and is a great little editor in it's own regard.

Edit : Actually, Notepad++ does support replace in files. Click Search -> Find in Files, then select "Replace in files" in the dialog.

Answer 2

In the spirit of previous answer, you can use Perl (which has seamless native Unicode support and whose RegEx capablity are unparalleled). There are Windows perl versions avialable (ActivePerl, Strawberry, or you can use CygWin), and you can even slap GUIs on top of it -= for the latter, you can see what answers are given to my very recent So question :)

Plus, Perl can grab pretty much unlimitedly powerful collection of files, by using globs for simple things, File::Find for more complicated, and using grep on resulting file list to refine further if you need more fancy stuff, e.g. by content of modification time.

UPDATE For a Windows Editor, you can use UltraEdit. It has free evaluation period, and to be perfectly honest, I find the purchase price to be WELL worth paying for this very nice and powerful editor. Among its other features, it supports Unicode, and has pretty fancy search/replace ablities, including Perl RegEx support and S/R in multiple files.

Answer 3

Use sed.

Answer 4

jEdit has a feature called "HyperSearch" (just open the find dialog). You can specify a directory, a file name pattern and jEdit (being based on Java) does support lots of different encodings (and is often smart enough to figure out the correct one).

Answer 5

You could try my editor, Code Trowel

If it doesn't do what you want I'd probably fix it :-)

Answer 6

For windows, Notepad++ is awesome. It's licensed under the GPL. It does search and replace in files and does support regular expressions.