- Sep 23, 2013
- Adding Text
- Cutting, Copying, and Pasting Text
- Dragging and Dropping Text
- Using Paste Special
- Applying Headings
- Applying Character Formats
- Applying HTML Text Styles
- Using Preformatted Text
- Adding Line Breaks
- Indenting and Aligning Text with HTML
- Working with Lists
- Inserting Special Characters
- Working with Font Styles
- Using Web Fonts
- Adding Automatic Dates
- Finding and Replacing
- Finding Text with a Simple Search
- Performing Advanced Text Searches
- Finding and Replacing in Source Code
- Finding and Replacing with a Specific Tag
- Using Regular Expressions for Searching
- Checking Spelling
Performing Advanced Text Searches
An advanced text search allows you to do a more precise search by looking for text within (or outside of) particular HTML tags. You can further fine-tune the search by specifying particular attributes of the HTML tags.
Perhaps the most common example of why you would want to use such a search lies in the title of your webpages. Whenever you create a new page in Dreamweaver, the page automatically gets the title “Untitled Document.” If you forget to enter titles, you could end up with a bunch of pages on your site with the same “Untitled Document” name (it’s easy to do; while writing this section, I found and fixed a page on my personal site that had been titled “Untitled Document” for four years!). A basic search and replace won’t help, because “Untitled Document” is within the <title> tag of the pages, and a basic search only searches the body of a document. An advanced text search, which combines text and HTML searches, is the solution.
To perform an advanced text search
Choose Edit > Find and Replace, or press Ctrl-F (Cmd-F).
The Find and Replace dialog appears.
- From the Find in pop-up menu, choose one of the options for the scope of your search.
From the Search pop-up menu, choose Text (Advanced).
The dialog changes and adds the option to search tags .
The Text (Advanced) option allows you to search for text within HTML tags.
- In the Find field, type the word or phrase that you’re looking for.
Choose either Inside Tag or Not Inside Tag from the pop-up menu next to the + and – buttons.
Inside Tag refers to text that is enclosed within a container tag, such as <p>...</p>.
- Choose an HTML tag from the Tag pop-up menu.
(Optional) If you want to narrow the search further by limiting the search to a particular attribute of the tag you chose in step 6, click the + button. If you do not, skip to step 12.
The attribute line is added to the dialog .
You can narrow your search further by adding one or more attributes to the tag search.
An example of an attribute would be the class attribute of the <table> tag.
- (Optional) From the first pop-up menu in the attribute line, choose With Attribute or Without Attribute.
(Optional) Choose the attribute you want from the next pop-up menu.
Dreamweaver only shows the attributes for the tag you chose in step 6.
- (Optional) Set a comparison in the next pop-up menu, choosing from = (equal), < (less than), > (greater than), or != (not equal). These only work if the attribute’s value is a numeric amount, such as the size attribute of the <input> tag—for example, <input size="4">.
(Optional) In the next field (which is also a pop-up menu), type the value of the attribute. This can be a number or text.
Choose [any value] from the pop-up menu. This is useful when you want all tags with a particular attribute, but you don’t care what the value of the attribute is.
- If you want to replace the found text, type the replacement word or phrase in the Replace field.
- Depending on what you want to do, click Find Next, Find All, Replace, or Replace All.