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Supported Formats

Liuer Pro can search text inside a wide range of file formats beyond plain text:

Liuer automatically detects and transcodes text encodings:

  • UTF-8, UTF-16, ASCII
  • GBK (Chinese)
  • Shift-JIS (Japanese)
  • EUC-KR (Korean)
  • And many other single-byte and multi-byte encodings

Binary files (images, videos, executables) are automatically detected and skipped.

Liuer can search inside a variety of compressed formats without manual extraction:

FormatExtensionProcessing
gzip.gzStreaming
bzip2.bz2Streaming
xz.xzStreaming
Zstandard.zstStreaming
ZIP archive.zipBatch, with recursive search
  • Single-file compression (gzip, bzip2, xz, zstd): decompressed in-memory and searched as plain text
  • ZIP archives: support deeply nested directory structures, configurable max decompressed size (default: 50 MB)

Extract and search text content from PDF files:

  • Text extraction with encoding detection
  • Handles both selectable text and OCR’d PDFs
  • Large PDFs may be skipped if they exceed limits

Search inside a wide range of office document formats:

Format GroupSupported Extensions
Microsoft OfficeWord (.doc, .docx, .docm), Excel (.xls, .xlsx, .xlsm), PowerPoint (.ppt, .pptx, .pptm)
OpenDocumentText (.odt), Spreadsheet (.ods), Presentation (.odp)
Apple iWorkPages (.pages), Numbers (.numbers), Keynote (.key)

XML-based text extraction with formatting preservation. Same memory limits apply as other batch formats.

Search inside email databases and notebook files:

  • Microsoft Outlook (.pst) — folder and message traversal, subject and body extraction
  • Apple Mail (.olm) — macOS Mail archive format, processed as ZIP
  • Microsoft OneNote (.one) — page and section parsing with title and outline extraction