Web Relay

Find & Replace

Find & Replace is so handy. I'm sure I haven't even begun to exploit the power of it such as searching for patterns. Wildcards are another nifty little thing you can use to isolate items.

For example, I would get a text file that had timecode in it and needed to convert this to a plain document to post for accessibility reasons. Timecode is denoted with [ ] but for some reason using the [*] meaning "everything between and including []" didn't work. So I had to replace [ with + and same for ]. Then do a find on +*+ with "use wildcards" checked and presto!, all timecodes were stripped. Careful with stuff enclosed in [] that you don't want to strip like [music].

The next thing I'd do is find ^p (the code for paragraph breaks) and remove all of those.

Finally, I'd go to Format > Change case and select lowercase, then sentence. This is in MS Word.

Find & Replace in Dreamweaver is super cool too. I learned you can search an entire folder and replace code. Very handy if you have a large site and need to update something.

posted by vwc @ 10:35 PM