DocFetcher

DocFetcher is an open-source desktop application for searching content in local files. The program indexes and searches for text within documents, compressed files, and emails on Windows, Linux, and macOS systems under the Eclipse Public License.

★★★★★

5.0(1 ratings)

• Portable search. The portable version works without installation on Windows, Linux, and macOS. The application runs from external storage devices, keeping settings and search indexes in the application directory.
• Unicode support. Full implementation of Unicode standards for Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, PDF, HTML, RTF, and plain text file formats. Encoding is automatically detected in documents with international characters.
• Compressed file processing. Compatibility with zip, 7z, rar, and tar variants. Customizable extension settings for zip-based files. Unlimited nesting of files within other compressed files.
• Source code search. Customization of extensions for recognizing plain text files. Indexing of programming languages and text-based formats. Combination with custom zip extensions for searching within JAR files.
• Outlook PST files. Indexing and searching of Microsoft Outlook emails stored in PST formats. Text extraction from messages, attachments, and email metadata.
• HTML pair detection. Automatic identification of HTML file pairs and associated folders. Treatment of pairs as a single document during indexing. Removal of auxiliary HTML folder content from search results.
• Regex file exclusion. Regular expressions to exclude files from the indexing process. Patterns like .*.xls to skip specific formats. Filtering by file paths, names, and extensions.
• MIME-type detection. Regular expressions to trigger MIME-type detection. Format identification through internal content analysis. Handling of files with incorrect extensions or no extension.
• Advanced query syntax. Boolean operators OR, AND, and NOT for combining terms. Wildcard, exact phrase, and fuzzy searching. Proximity search with word distance specification.
• Incremental indexing. Selective index updates for modified files. File system change monitoring. Automatic reindexing after changes to already indexed documents.
• Preview interface. Results display panel with highlighting of found terms. Navigation between occurrences within the same document. Display of metadata and file location information.
• Analyzer configuration. Selection of text analyzers for different document formats. Configuration of text extraction parameters. Settings for handling special characters and stop-words.

DocFetcher development began in 2008 as an open-source project. The creators are independent programmers who maintain the application voluntarily. The implementation uses the Java language with Apache Lucene libraries for indexing and search functionalities. Updates include compatibility with new document formats and performance improvements to the search engine.

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