How do you search a text file fast and output only the results?

Recommend windows application Replace Pioneer, its quite easy to extract the required line from a text file. No coding required.

How to extract all lines that match "X|J|X| Mitch|"?

1. install "Replace Pioneer" and launch

2. ctrl-o open your log file(text format)

3. ctrl-h open 'Replace' window

* set 'Replace Unit' to 'Line'

* set 'Search for pattern' to:

.*?\|J\|.*?\| Mitch\|(Note: .*? means any chars, \| means column)

* set 'replace with pattern' to:

$match\n(Note:$match means the line that matches, \n means newline character)

* uncheck option of "Print unmatched Unit"(means discard rest lines)

4. click "Replace", done!

In your case, you will get following result in a new page:

2010-09-11 00:05:54|J|2| Mitch|

Replace Pioneer free trial and examples download at:

If you have any programming skills it would be a simple matter to write a quick & dirty program to read this test file as input and then act accordingly on whatever you wanted to do.

However, since you asked the question, that leads me to believe that is not an option for you.

Another method might be to simply sort this text file by a certain column or columns. Most quality text editors (like TextPad) can sort on several different keys, that you specify. You also might be able to load it into, say Excel, and then sort the columns as you saw fit.

Here's a solution in BATCH

@echo off

del newfile.txt 2>nul

for /f "tokens=1-4delims=|" %%a in (logfile.name) do (

if %%b==J if " %%d"=="%1" >>newfile.txt echo %%a %%b %%c %%d

)

Save this in a file called 'process.bat' then from the command-prompt type

process Matthew

and the 'Matthew' line will appear in the file newfile.txt

* Note that the above IS case-sensitive for %%a..%%d.

* It is also case-sensitive for 'Matthew'. You could change

if " %%d"=="%1"'

to

if /i " %%d"=="%1"

to make it case-insensitive for the parameter (ie it would match for "MATTHEW" or "mAtTHeW"...)

see newsgroup alt.msdos.batch.nt for lots of similar techniques...