VX Search provides a file search rule capable of searching files containing or not containing a user-specified text pattern. In order to match files by a text string, add the 'Text String' file search rule, select an appropriate text matching operator and enter a text string to search for.

Many types of files, such as binary files, images or videos, do not contain textual information and it is a good idea to exclude such files from the file search process in order to improve the performance of the file search operations. The best approach is to set the first file search rule to limit the file search operation to types of files containing textual information and one or more additional file search rules to actually perform the search inside of the specified types of files.

For example, in order to search a text string in all HTML and PHP files, set the first file search rule to match the HTML or PHP file extensions and then add one more file search rule to search a text string in the contents of HTML and PHP files. In this case, all other types of files will be excluded from the file search process and the file search operation will be significantly faster especially when searching inside of files via the network.