Mass HTML Page Changes

beyond search & replace...

[Jack_Hughes]

I am currently changing a XHTML/CSS based site over to a new design. there are around 350 pages.

The new design involves a number of new divs in various places. To change manually will take at least a week, maybe more.

Do you know of any tools (not programming languages) that make complex text manipulations easy?

[dcrombie]

I would start by looking at "diff" and "patch". If your pages are all similar it may be that you can modify just one page and then 'patch' the others.

[chriswragg]

In DW you can use the find and replace option in the edit menu, then you can select to search throgh the entire site. If you then type or copy in a piece of code that appears throughout your documents into the search box, then you add it also to the replace box and add the other piece of code, it will do this in seconds. Also if you use the fund next button, you can always exclude some pages. This may not work if you don't have a same piece of code in each document or if you don't have a site set up or if you don't have DW...

[tedster]

Homesite - which has often been bundled with Dreamweaver - allows extended search and replace over many documents. It also supports regular expressions so that you can search for a pattern, rather than just an exact text-string match.

[edited by: tedster at 9:52 pm (utc) on Dec. 21, 2004]

[webdude]

BBedit would work for this.

[Conard]

Second vote for HomeSite.
Saved my rear end more times than I can count.

[rdenoie]

unix command 'sed'

complicated but most effective

[henry0]

Maybe it's time to fully separate content and "Skeleton"

regards

[Jon_King]

>>It also supports regular expressions so that you can search for a pattern

Thanks much for that tip.