[Feature Request] Search text function

[privacyguy123]

I often find AI Agents using regex in the list_strings output which seems unsupported/broken? I have to manually search a lot and copy/paste the results. I also find the "Search Text" function in IDA much more useful, it often contains things not in the "Strings" window. Is it possible to add this as an MCP tool?

[mrexodia]

While exposing this functionality is possible it seems like this is more of a hack to avoid implementing proper tools, similar to giving the AI access to Python scripting. What specific functionality are you missing?

[gurumih]

This is the problem he's talking about. We are unable to search strings using MCP as it fails. It'd be really nice if you could fix it.

[mrexodia]

What model are you using? It looks like it’s not good enough to correctly call the function, so nothing I could change to fix that…

[gurumih]

I've tried Claude Sonett 3.5 and 3.7. I also tried Gemini 2.5 but that didn't do it either. Can you check once from your side?

[mrexodia]

It looks like this is an MCP client bug. Everything works fine for me with Claude, but the inspector triggers similar errors when leaving the filter empty.

I will try to see if I can work around this, what client are you using?

[mrexodia]

You can see in modelcontextprotocol/inspector#406 that this bug also happens with the inspector MCP client, it is a bug.

[djfaizp]

i was also about to raise issue on it but i found it is already created. can we have this feature !

[gurumih]

i was also about to raise issue on it but i found it is already created. can we have this feature !

Apparently it's a MCP bug, the repo owner had shown it working fine in Claude but I personally can't get it to work in Windsurf, Cursor, Copilot.

[mrexodia]

Just FYI, for me it works fine with Windsurf (SWE-1). For Copilot it fails with GPT-4o, but it works with Claude 3.7 🤷‍♂ (sorry, pasted wrong image earlier)

So as initially suspected, some models are not smart enough to call the function correctly. I checked and it is practically impossible to allow parameters to be omitted with default value as a workaround. It would be possible to add dedicated _filter overloads, but I suspect the models will still be too dumb to realize they cannot call this function without the filter argument if no filter is necessary.

[mrexodia]

Alright, I separated the functions into _filter variants. Try again to see if it works, just tame your expectations with lower-powered models like Gemini because they just do not perform very well with tool use.

[williballenthin]

It might help to add some examples to the docstrings, to help teach the model how to invoke the function in various cases. For example, in another agent framework, I've developed docstrings like the following to augment the type hints:

This is probably a pretty low effort/skill change that might have a substantial effect.

[gurumih]

Alright, I separated the functions into _filter variants. Try again to see if it works, just tame your expectations with lower-powered models like Gemini because they just do not perform very well with tool use.

Hey, I wanted to let you know that it works now. I tested with both Windsurf and Cursor and it is able to use list_strings without any issues so far. Thanks for the fix