Which program/tool/app can search within do files?

[Anna Zajacova]

Hi, I am looking for a search app that would 'see' into do files. The search tools I use all skip the do files, so when I try to find something I have somewhere in some old do files in some folder who-knows-where, I am unable to do so. Do you know of any such search tools, free or paid? thanks so much!

[Mike Lacy]

TextPad, a shareware text editor popular with some Stata users, has a reasonably full-featured "search in files" function. Doubtless other popular text editors can do this, too.

[daniel klein]

Do-files contain just plain ASCII (well, nowadays unicode). You can use Stata to search in do-files. Say you are looking for the word "foo" in the do-file foobar.do. You could

clear
set obs 1
generate file = fileread("foobar.do")
generate foo = strpos(file, "foo")

Best
Daniel