Show HN: Rga: ripgrep, but also search in PDFs, Office documents, zip, tar.gz

Yes, that's an absurd amount of development effort and would result in a serious performance regression. (To the point that it's likely nobody would use ripgrep at all, so your approach would need to be put behind a flag, which seriously hinders the feature since it's no longer automatic.) Moreover, that only covers match detection, but does not actually cover output. Once you find the match, you have to determine how to print it, and the device you're printing to very likely does not support things like UTF-32 or even UTF-16 in many cases. Moreover, there are many operations that ripgrep does in a post-processing step (like limiting the output to a certain number of characters per line) that require knowing the presumed encoding (which is always UTF-8 by that point, since the data will have been transcoded to UTF-8 if UTF-16 were detected).

> UTF-16 doesn't require BOMs

You cannot decode UTF-16 without knowing its byte order. The BOM tells you that. If there is no BOM, then you need to get the byte order from some other source (or guess it). ripgrep requires the user to tell it what it is. This seems entirely reasonable to me, especially since most or all UTF-16 files I've seen include a BOM. Notably, ripgrep's support for UTF-16 is good enough for VS Code, which has a pretty sizable Windows user base.

> your view then I'm not sure how else to word it, but the wording is hardly my concern. At the end of the day I was just trying to convey a fact, not argue over its wording or semantics.

At the end of the day, my concern is to correct misleading claims about what ripgrep can and can't do. ripgrep clearly has support for UTF-16, and this is actually one of its marquee features that sets it apart from other search tools. For example, grep doesn't (and literally can't) support UTF-16 at all. The only way to search UTF-16 encoded files with grep is to transcode the file to UTF-8 first or to set the locale to C, and search for the binary encoding directly. ripgrep does a lot better than that, so to lump it in with "pretty much every text search tool" is pretty misleading from my perspective.