Setting the Find and Replace dialog box options

Use the Find and Replace dialog box to search for text or tags in a document, and to replace the found material with other text or tags.

To set find and replace options:

1. Use the Find In option to specify which files to search:

   Current Document confines the search to the active document.

   Open Documents searches all documents that are currently open.

   Entire Current Local Site expands the search to all the HTML documents, library files, and text documents in the current site.

   Selected Files in Site confines the search to the files and folders that are currently selected in the Files panel.

   Folder confines the search to a specific folder. After choosing Folder, click the folder icon to browse to and select a folder to search.

   Selected Text confines the search to the text that’s currently selected in the active document.

2. Use the Search pop-up menu to specify the kind of search you want to perform:

   Source Code lets you search for specific text strings in the HTML source code. You can search for specific tags using this option, but the Specific Tag search provides a more flexible approach to searching for tags.

   Text lets you search for specific text strings in the text of the document. A text search ignores any HTML that interrupts the string. For example, a search for the black dog would match both the black dog and the <i>black</i> dog.

   Text (Advanced) lets you search for specific text strings that are either within or not within a tag or tags. For example, in a document that contains the following HTML, searching for tries and specifying Not Inside Tag and the i tag would find only the second instance of the word tries: John <i>tries</i> to get his work done on time, but he doesn’t always succeed. He tries very hard. See Setting the Find and Replace dialog box options for an advanced text search.

   Specific Tag lets you search for specific tags, attributes, and attribute values, such as all td tags with valign set to top. (See Setting the Find and Replace dialog box options for a specific tag search.)

   NOTE

   Pressing Control+Enter or Shift+Enter (Windows), or Control+Return, Shift+Return, or Command+Return (Macintosh), adds line breaks within the text search fields, allowing you to search for a Return character. When performing such a search, deselect the Ignore Whitespace Differences option if you’re not using regular expressions. This search finds a Return character in particular, not simply the occurrence of a line break; for instance, it doesn’t find a <br> tag or a <p> tag. Return characters appear as spaces in the Design view, not as line breaks.

3. Use the following options to expand or limit the search:

   Match Case limits the search to text that exactly matches the case of the text you want to find. For example, if you search for the brown derby, you will not find The Brown Derby.

   Ignore Whitespace Differences treats all whitespace as a single space for the purposes of matching. For example, with this option selected, this text would match this text and this      text but not thistext. This option is not available when the Use Regular Expressions option is selected; you must explicitly write your regular expression to ignore whitespace. Note that <p> and <br> tags do not count as whitespace.

   Match Whole Word limits the search to text that matches one or more complete words.

   NOTE

   Using this option is equivalent to doing a regular-expression search for a search string that starts and ends with \b, the word-boundary regular expression.

   Use Regular Expressions causes certain characters and short strings (such as ?, *, \w, and \b) in your search string to be interpreted as regular expression operators. For example, a search for the b\w*\b dog will match both the black dog and the barking dog. (See Regular expressions.)

   NOTE

   If you are working in Code view and make changes to your document, and try to find and replace anything other than source code, a dialog box appears letting you know that Dreamweaver is synchronizing the two views before doing the search. For more information on synchronizing views, see Viewing your code.

4. To search without replacing, click the Find Next or Find All buttons:

   Find Next jumps to and selects the next occurrence of the search text or tags in the current document. If there are no more instances of the tag in the current document, Dreamweaver proceeds to the next document, if you are searching in more than one document.

   Find All opens the Search panel in the Results panel group. If you are searching a single document, Find All displays all occurrences of the search text or tags, with some surrounding context. If you are searching a directory or site, Find All displays a list of documents that contain the tag.

5. To replace found text or tags, click the Replace or Replace All buttons.

Related topics

• Searching for and replacing text
• Searching and replacing tags and attributes