Export content from Windows explorer search

Question

When I do a search in Windows Explorer (Windows10) in a directory with many PDF documents I get the results giving me in the first column the file name and in the second column the path and a a preview of part of the content. When I hover over the content part more information is shown on the content.

I suppose this means the content of the PDF files is somehow indexed.

I would now like to export this content information from the search result (including or not the path and filename) to a text file or xls.

I would like to export the content information for all files in the search in one go.

Is it possible to do this from Windows explorer or in some other way?

Answer 1

zef,

If want copy all PDF documents content to a TXT file you can use this:

Via command line, open cmd.exe and type:

FOR %1 in (Documents\*.pdf) DO echo f | xcopy "%1" "%~dp1new-files\%~n1.txt"

• Assuming your terminal opens in the following folder: C:\Users\zef\
• This will do a loop search on your wanted folder only for PDF files
• Make a copy to your_folder/new-files/ and rename to .txt
• This, only searches and rename your PDF to TXT file, it's not a conversion
• If you want convert you need a 3rd party application to do this, like GhostScript
  • More about: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6187250/pdf-text-extraction

Reference:

• https://ss64.com/nt/syntax-args.html
• How to copy a file to a directory in DOS, and create directories if necessary?
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30651776/xcopy-returns-error-invalid-number-of-parameters-when-exclude-parameter-is-set
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11192039/how-to-do-a-for-loop-in-windows-command-line

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If want just a list of your results:

1. Open Windows Explorer and search for what you want
2. When the search results populate, select all (Ctrl + A)
3. Hold the Shift key and Right Click on the search results
4. Select "Copy as Path" (this option only shows up when you hold shift before the right click)
5. Paste into a notepad window, Excel spreadsheet, etc...

The results will be formatted as:

• "\path\to\first\item"
• "\path\to\second\item"

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Via command line, open cmd.exe and type:

dir C:\Users\zef\Documents\*.pdf" /s /b > result.txt

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Reference: social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/