Win32 library provides fast search and replace capabilities for applications and Web pages

Available as both a fast dynamic-link library (DLL) and as a small ActiveX control, the Witzend Search Library gives instant search and replace capabilities to Win32 applications and Web pages. The Witzend Search Library offers sophisticated features such as Boolean operators and fuzzy searching, and can search both memory buffers and disks to quickly locate files that contain given words and phrases.

The Witzend Search Library easily attaches to any Win32 application, whether written in C++, Java, Visual Basic, VBScript, JavaScript, or any other Win32 language. Through an elegantly simple programming interface, the Witzend Search Library handles all search operations with only 8 exported functions, and generally an application requires the services of only 3 functions. For example, to search an entire disk directory (including nested subdirectories) a program calls only 3 functions: InitFileSearch, SearchFile, and CloseFileSearch.

About the Witzend Search Library

The Witzend Search Library gives an application the ability to search backward or forward through disk files or buffers of any size, searching for ANSI, double-byte, and Unicode strings. Search options include case-sensitivity (find Abc but not abc) and whole-word searching (find any but not anywhere). The Witzend Search Library can even find misspelled words through its fuzzy-search feature.

To search for and/or replace text in disk files, an application specifies search parameters and the disk directory at which to begin searching, then simply calls the Witzend Search Library. Date and size filters provide additional control over the search process, allowing an application, for example, to confine searches to only those files dated within the last month between 10K and 50K in size.

The Witzend Search Library can "drill-down" through nested directories, looking for search strings associated by AND, OR, NOT, and NEAR operators. The Witzend Search Library does not first index files before searching them -- it doesn't need to because it's so fast.

The Witzend Search Library's searching algorithm is a sophisticated model developed by Witzend Software. Written in assembly language that has been carefully hand-tuned, the Witzend Search Library consistently out-performs other searching software in informal tests conducted by Witzend Software.

Download a Free Demo

You can try out the Witzend Search Library for yourself. The WitzDemo program is a handy file-searching utility that uses the Search Library to quickly locate disk files containing specified text. Click the image to receive Witzend.EXE (94K), which creates these three files: WitzDemo.EXE, WitzSrch.DLL, and Readme.TXT.

Note: These programs do not make changes to any files or to your registry. If you prefer not to keep WitzDemo after trying it out, simply delete the files from your disk.

First run Witzend.EXE to unzip the three files, then run WitzDemo.EXE. You will find WitzDemo a user-friendly program with a very intuitive interface. The Readme.TXT file contains more information about WitzDemo and the Witzend Search Library.

The licensed product includes a 30-day warranty, free technical support from Witzend Software, and complete on-line documentation and source code for the WitzDemo demonstration program. WitzDemo is written in C++ using MFC, and shows how an application can query the user for search parameters through a tabbed dialog. (Please note that source code for the Search Library itself is not included.)