Search Indexed File Hierarchy Formerly Hermetic MultiFile Search

Windows software for indexing and rapidly searching a hierarchy of files

1. To search files on a flash drive or a CD-ROM (e.g. when that is a copy of a website).
2. To search the chapters of a book or the sections of a report.
3. To search the local source files of your website (files on your PC).
4. To search files in a single folder containing many miscellaneous and unrelated files.

The index module is capable of indexing a hierarchy of over 1000 text, DOCX or HTML files, totalling over 20 Mb, and containing over 50,000 different words. In one test, the index module indexed 475 files (a mixture of text files, HTML files and Word DOCX files) containing 55.61 Mb of text, in about 29 minutes, to produce an index consisting of 117,454 different words. Even with that number of different words the search module returns results in just a few seconds.

The results of a search are displayed automatically in a text box or in your default web browser (with links to the files containing the words searched for).

This software is mainly intended to be used to search for words and phrases in a set of files which is permanent or does not change much. Minor editing of the files will not affect performance, files can be removed, and the set of searchable files can be moved to a different place.

It may also be used with a temporary set of files, in the sense that you might just want to search a particular set of files for a short time. If there are fewer than 100 files that you wish to search, containing fewer than 10,000 different words, then the index module will create a new index file in less than a minute and you can then search those files.

This program regards a word as any consecutive sequence of letters, numbers (that is, digits, 0-9) and optionally one or more hyphens, subject to the condition that the first charcter is a letter. Thus a word may not include an apostrophe or any other punctuation. Non-english characters such as ü and é are allowed in words, so this software can be used with text in most European languages such as German, Spanish, etc.

ANSI is the single-byte text encoding which is the default encoding on your PC. UTF-8 is a variable-byte-length encoding of Unicode characters, often used in HTML and XML files.

Indexable (and thus searchable) files are MS Word DOCX files (but not Word DOC files), text and text-like files, which may be ordinary text files, HTML files, XML files, and in general any non-binary file, that is, any file which consists only of ANSI text characters plus whitespace. This allows text which includes non-English letters such as ä, é and ñ. The program works with DOCX files and with text-like files which consist entirely of text encoded via the 8-bit Windows-1252 encoding (this is a superset of ISO 8859-1). Languages which can be 8-bit encoded using Windows-1252 include English, German, French, Danish, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish and Finnish.

Some text files are automatically excluded if they have file extensions such as css and js (a complete list of excluded file extensions is given here).

To use this software it is not necessary to study a lengthy manual or follow flow charts. Its use is fully explained in these two web pages: