With PowerGREP, you don’t need to worry about line breaks. On top of that, Unicode introduced additional line break characters. This causes many Windows applications to display text from Linux files all on one line.

But UNIX and Linux use a single LF and classic Mac used a single CR to end lines. Windows text files normally use a CRLF pair for line breaks. Inconsistent line break handling is also a problem with many grep tools. If you work with many different encodings, you can use the setting “text encoding to read files with” on the File Selector panel to tell PowerGREP exactly which encodings it should use for exactly which files. This includes Unicode signatures or byte order markers, HTML meta tags, XML declarations, and even UTF-8 and UTF-16 byte patterns. PowerGREP can automatically detect encodings in a variety of ways. So you can search through, make replacements in, collect matches from, and write results to files in any encoding that your other software may be using or expecting. PowerGREP can read and write all these encodings. While most Windows grep and search tools only support text files saved with a Windows code page or Unicode, PowerGREP supports all character sets that have or ever had any importance, including Unicode (UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32), all Windows code pages, all ISO-8859 character sets (often used on Linux in the past), most legacy MS-DOS, PC DOS, and classic MacOS code pages, ECBDIC (used by IBM mainframes), KOI8 (popular in Russia and CIS countries), the many Vietnamese encodings, and a variety of other specialized code pages. Since different computer manufacturers had different ideas about how to create character mappings, there’s a wide variety of legacy character mappings. Different character mappings or code pages are used for different language and scripts. When you save a text file, each character is mapped to a number, and the numbers are stored on disk. Computers deal with numbers, not with characters. If you open a DOCX file in a plain text editor, you will see only garbage. On the other hand, a document created with Microsoft Word is stored in a binary format. txt file created with a plain text editor such as Notepad or EditPad is stored in that way. A plain text file is a computer file that is stored entirely as text in a human-readable form.

Convert computer code to text