findstr or grep that autodetects chararacter encod

Question

I want to do this:

 findstr /s /c:some-symbol *

or the grep equivalent

 grep -R some-symbol *

but I need the utility to autodetect files encoded in UTF-16 (and friends) and search them appropriately. My files even have the byte-ordering mark FFEE in them so I'm not even looking for heroic autodetection.

Any suggestions?

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I'm referring to Windows Vista and XP.

Answer 1

You didn't say which platform you want to do this on.

On Windows, you could use PowerGREP, which automatically detects Unicode files that start with a byte order mark. (There's also an option to auto-detect files without a BOM. The auto-detection is very reliable for UTF-8, but limited for UTF-16.)