How to search OneDrive 365 for PDFs containing text (vs rasterized image of text) for keywords without coding? I can only find coding solutions which are not built-in functions of Office 365 nor Windows 11 and IMHO incurs security and maintenance risk

Question

I need help with listing full pathname of PDF files containing a word.

Get-ChildItem -Path C:\Users\Me -Include *.pdf -File -Recurse -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue | Select-String -pattern “Tax” | group path | select name | Out-File -FilePath .\FindPDFcontainingTax.txt -NoClobber

output listed PDF not containing 'Tax'

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Your main problem is that PDF files do not store contents in plain text. Your script should work for .TXT files.

For PDF files you will need to use something that can "read" the PDF contents.

https://superuser.com/questions/1278479/search-pdf-contents-with-powershell-and-output-a-file-list

Answer 2

$searchstring = "Tax"

$directory = Get-ChildItem -Path C:\Users\Sunny\ -Recurse -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

foreach ($obj in $directory)

{Get-Content $obj.fullname | Where-Object {$_.Contains($s

OUTPUTS AS FOLLOWS

Get-Content : Access to the path denied

Answer 3

, why isn't there a non-coding solution?

Just use Windows search then.

Verify that you are indexing file contents.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/lwef/-search-2x-wds-aqsreference

Answer 4

Thanks but why doesn't all PDF get highlighted as shown in screenshot? these PDFs in my case contains text not rasterized image of text because they can be directly searched by opening individually without text scan or OCR and therefore not image type.