How to Find and Replace HTML With Dreamweaver

If you need to replace an old or unused tag in an HTML document, or simply change unneeded line breaks into paragraphs, you can do it quickly and easily with Dreamweaver 3.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderate

Things You’ll Need:

• Macromedia Dreamweaver

1. Start the Dreamweaver program and open the page to be edited.
2. From the Edit menu, choose Replace. The Replace dialog box will pop up.
3. Choose the replacement option you want from the menu. Find in Current Document replaces all instances of your search term in the current (open) document; Current Site replaces all instances in the entire site; and Folder replaces all instances in a selected folder.
4. Select what will be replaced from the Find What menu. Replace Text replaces only the text on the page (ignoring the HTML); HTML Source searches for a specific string of text and commands from the source code; Advanced Text searches both text and HTML, or either one; and Tag allows you to designate specific tags to be replaced.
5. Select Replace to replace each instance separately; choose Replace All to replace all instances at once.
6. Save the page when finished.

Tips & Warnings

• Choose the Match Case option to match uppercase or lowercase words as needed.
• Make sure the Ignore Whitespace box is checked. This option treats all spaces between words as text and ignores them.
• Make a copy of the page before you edit it. If something on your Web site doesn't seem to work correctly, try checking the new HTML code against the old copy's HTML. Dreamweaver may have pulled a tag it didn't recognize.