Find and Replace using Wildcards

[jds_zigzag]

I am following the procedure outlined in Trent’s Blog:

http://www.trentmueller.com/blog/search-and-replace-wildcard-characters-in-dreamweaver.html

This is fantastic stuff and will really help me.

I have a few (but only a few) times had success.

It says to “Use regular expression.”  What does that mean?  What is an “irregular expression?”  I have tried with the box checked and unchecked.  Usually with the box checked it will not Find my string.  I uncheck the box and it sometimes does.

Example:

Link to    www.schembs.com/TEST_jds_1.html

At the moment all the Cases are identical.  I have not uploaded the .css to the site so the right-most formating is not properly displaying.  It does work when the .css is available.

In the source code I literally copy the line of code:

<p class="type_X"><u>Joh. Heinrich Sch&ouml;m (1713-1785) <span  class="right-most">1.</span></u></p>

and paste it into the Find box of F&R.  I then put my cursor above the line and it does not Find it, giving me the “Done.  Not found in current document.” response.  I uncheck the “Use regular expression” box and it will find it.

THEN,

I try using a wildcard (with the box checked), Finding:

<p class="type_X">([^<]*)< p>

or

<p class="type_X">[^”]*< p>

and it will find the misc. lines, e.g. where the text is “Case #1”, but not the lines of interest, with Heinrich’s name.  With the box unchecked it Finds nothing.

Really would appreciate help.  Thanks.

jds

[Mylenium]

It says to “Use regular expression.”  What does that mean? 

http://www.regular-expressions.info/

Mylenium

[David_Powers · Accepted solution]

jds zigzag wrote:

It says to “Use regular expression.”  What does that mean?

A regular expression is a pattern for matching text. It uses a combination of literal characters and special symbols or sequences of characters (technically called metacharacters or metasequences) to represent such things as the beginning and end of a line or any alphanumeric character. For example, \d represents any number (single digit), \d* represents zero or more numbers in sequence.

I have written a tutorial series on using regular expressions in Dreamweaver here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/regular_expressions_pt1.html.

I try using a wildcard (with the box checked), Finding:

<p class="type_X">([^<]*)< p>

or

<p class="type_X">[^”]*< p>

They're not wildcards, but regular expressions. The first part matches the literal characters <p class="type_X">. The next sections use metacharacters.

([^<]*) matches zero or more characters (and as many as possible) that don't include an opening angle bracket (<). The parentheses "capture" the value that's matched so it can be used in a replace sequence.

[^"]* matches zero or more characters (and as many as possible) that don't include a double quote. There are no parentheses, so the value is not captured for reuse.

The closing <p> matches those literal characters.

Regular expressions are not easy, but they're extremely powerful, and a good skill to acquire.

[jds_zigzag]

Your reply was very helpful.  Unfortunately I concluded that I could only use the Wildcard capability in some of the cases.  There are too many permutations of the raw callouts that the scripts get too complicated -- one had fourteen wildcards.  I am guessing that if one were more expert, there are ways of writing more advanced scripts and solving it that way.  But only using it as a novice it will be very helpful.  The rest of my work will be brute force.  Thanks.

jds