Basic searching for strings and files

Imagine searching for a four leaf clover in a big garden. It would be really hard (and it is still really hard for computers). Thankfully, words are not images and text on a computer is easily searchable depending on the format. The term format has to be used because if your tool cannot understand a given type of text (encoding), then you might have trouble recognizing a pattern or even detecting that there is text at all!

Typically, when you are looking at the console, text files, source code (C, C++, Bash, HTML), spreadsheets, XML, and other types, you are looking at it in ASCII or UTF. ASCII is a commonly used format in the *NIX world on the console. There is also the UTF encoding scheme, which is an improvement upon ASCII and can support a variety of extended characters that were not present in computing originally. It comes in a number of formats such as UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF32.

In this recipe, we will begin the process of searching for strings and a couple of ways to search for some of your own needles in a massive haystack of data. Let's dig in.