WAgame manager/archiver?

[zookman]

What I want to be able to do is 'keyword search' the in game chat logs for a specific conversation I had with an unknown player at an unknown time.

I assume doing this on-the-fly wouldn't be viable, as each WAgame file would require separate processing. I might be wrong.

But if I could somehow batch process all 10k+ of my WAgames, and end up with a searchable chat log document, then I'd be able to find that specific conversation.

Ideas?

[GreeN]

mass extract the logs and use windows search or find a hex editor that can search for unicode strings

[StepS]

mass extract the logs

no need. Chat messages themselves are plain text in the replays. Just use Search in contents

unicode

what?

[GreeN]

what?

text strings, as opposed to hex values

[StepS]

they aren't in Unicode.

[Pac-Man]

If the Windows Indexing Service for the Windows Search works correctly (e.g. never?), you can also set up the WAgame extension to be searched in a way which also reads the content of the files - including the chat logs. Then you just have to enter the chat text in the search box when you're in the replays folder.

To set it up like this (Vista / 7 only):
- Start, enter "index" and select "Indexing options" in the search results.
http://pacman.highfsb.com/team17/index001.png
- Click the "Advanced" button in the new window:
http://pacman.highfsb.com/team17/index002.png
- Select the "File Types" tab page in the new window.
- Choose "WAgame" in the file extension list (you can enter WAgame after you have clicked into it), and check the second radio button:
http://pacman.highfsb.com/team17/index003.png
Accept all windows and have a try. Maybe Windows needs some time to index the contents first.

[Lex]

You could get and use ack (http://betterthangrep.com) for this purpose. You'd have to install Perl 5.8.8 or higher, then install ack. Ack is like grep, but better. Also, there's a supposedly-better tool called Ag (https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher) (or "The Silver Searcher") which is like ack but uses simple search strings instead of regular expressions, but searches multiple times faster.

Don't expect using these to be newbie-friendly. Both tools only have command line interfaces. However, once installed and working, these tools are very valuable for searching for anything within many files.