Find won't work in TextEdit

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Find won't work in TextEdit

I opened a file in TextEdit. I saved it as Plain Text, but left it open. When I returned to edit the file again, it had "garbage" characters at the top and at the bottom. Instead of just closing the file without doing another save, I edited out the garbage then I saved and closed the file. When I opened the file again, it looked fine, but when I used the Find command in TextEdit, it doesn't find text I know is in the file. It almost as if it doesn't recognize the file as text. I dropped into a Terminal window and ran the Unix "file" command. It says the file is of type "data." My other .txt files are type "ASCII text." I tried cutting and pasting some of the text in the file to a new file and checked to see if it was searchable with Find. It's not. Is there any way I can make this file searchable again?

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.7)

Posted on Jun 11, 2011 1:35 PM

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Answer 1

sig

Level 8

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Jun 11, 2011 2:32 PM in response to sakinn

"...I saved it as Plain Text..."

TextEdit does not have that option, "Plain Text" so your issue is hard to replicate.

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Answer 2

CT

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Jun 11, 2011 2:35 PM in response to sig

I guess what was meant is that the OP converted the file to Plain Text via the Format menu. sakinn: where did this file come from?

charlie

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Answer 3

sakinn Author

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Jun 11, 2011 2:41 PM in response to CT

The file was originally created in TextEdit on a system running Tiger. I have edited it (and searched it) successfully many times on Snow Leopard. When I said I saved it as "Plain Text," I meant that I have my TextEdit preferences set to save files as Plain Text as opposed to Rich Text.

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Answer 4

CT

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Jun 11, 2011 2:49 PM in response to sakinn

Sounds like the file might have gotten corrupted somehow. What happens if you select the text and paste it into a new plain text file?

charlie

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Answer 5

sakinn Author

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Jun 11, 2011 2:54 PM in response to CT

The new file has the same problem. I guess I'll have to try restoring from a Time Machine backup.

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Answer 6

CT

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Jun 11, 2011 2:56 PM in response to sakinn

Good plan. Assuming the file actually did get corrupted, it might be a good idea to verify your disk (not permissions) via Disk Utility.

charlie

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Answer 7

sakinn Author

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Jun 11, 2011 3:02 PM in response to CT

Good idea. Thanks for your help.

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Answer 8

sakinn Author

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Jun 14, 2011 1:18 PM in response to sakinn

I discovered a way to restore the original (non-corrupt) version of my file. I dropped into a Terminal window and executed the following command:

tr -cd "\011\012\015[\040-\177]" < corrupt_filename.txt > good_filename.txt

This bascially says strip out all of the characters from the file named "corrupt_filename.txt" that aren't a tab (011), a line feed (012), a carriage return (015) or a printable ASCII character (040-177) and save the result to a file called "good_filename.txt".

The resulting file is of type "ASCII English text, with CR, LF line terminators" instead of "data" so it is again searchable in TextEdit.

Do a "man tr" in a Terminal window to see complete documentation for the tr command.

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