What I want to be able to do is 'keyword search' the in game chat logs for a specific conversation I had with an unknown player at an unknown time.

I assume doing this on-the-fly wouldn't be viable, as each WAgame file would require separate processing. I might be wrong.

But if I could somehow batch process all 10k+ of my WAgames, and end up with a searchable chat log document, then I'd be able to find that specific conversation.

Ideas?

mass extract the logs and use windows search or find a hex editor that can search for unicode strings

mass extract the logs

no need. Chat messages themselves are plain text in the replays. Just use Search in contents

unicode

what?

what?

text strings, as opposed to hex values

they aren't in Unicode.

If the Windows Indexing Service for the Windows Search works correctly (e.g. never?), you can also set up the WAgame extension to be searched in a way which also reads the content of the files - including the chat logs. Then you just have to enter the chat text in the search box when you're in the replays folder.

To set it up like this (Vista / 7 only):
- Start, enter "index" and select "Indexing options" in the search results.
http://pacman.highfsb.com/team17/index001.png
- Click the "Advanced" button in the new window:
http://pacman.highfsb.com/team17/index002.png
- Select the "File Types" tab page in the new window.
- Choose "WAgame" in the file extension list (you can enter WAgame after you have clicked into it), and check the second radio button:
http://pacman.highfsb.com/team17/index003.png
Accept all windows and have a try. Maybe Windows needs some time to index the contents first.

You could get and use ack (http://betterthangrep.com) for this purpose. You'd have to install Perl 5.8.8 or higher, then install ack. Ack is like grep, but better. Also, there's a supposedly-better tool called Ag (https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher) (or "The Silver Searcher") which is like ack but uses simple search strings instead of regular expressions, but searches multiple times faster.

Don't expect using these to be newbie-friendly. Both tools only have command line interfaces. However, once installed and working, these tools are very valuable for searching for anything within many files.