Advanced Text Searches

If you want greater control over a text search, use the Find and Replace command’s advanced text search option, which lets you confine a search to text either inside or outside a specific tag.

For example, when Dreamweaver creates a new blank document, it sets the page’s Title property to Untitled Document. Unfortunately, if you forget to change it, a site can quickly fill up with untitled web pages. A basic text search doesn’t identify this problem, because it searches only the body of a page; titles appear in the head. And a source-code search for Untitled Document would turn up the words “untitled document” wherever they appeared in the page, not just inside the <title> tag.

In cases like this, an advanced text search is your best choice. Simply set the Find and Replace command to search for Untitled Document whenever it appears within the <title> tag. To use advanced text search, follow the same general routine as described on the previous pages. But before using one of the action buttons, you make a few additional setup changes to the dialog box.

Limiting the Search by Tag

Choose Text (Advanced) from the Search pop-up menu to make the expanded controls appear (see Figure 20-4). Now, from the menu next to the + and – buttons, choose either Inside Tag or Not Inside Tag. For example, consider this line of code: “Stupid is as <strong>stupid</strong> does.” The first instance of “stupid” isn’t inside the <strong> tag, but the second one is.

Note

A more descriptive ...

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