Title: ADDITIONAL USAGE NOTES
Last modified: March 24, 2017

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# ADDITIONAL USAGE NOTES

 *  [Eric Armstrong](https://wordpress.org/support/users/aeric325/)
 * (@aeric325)
 * [9 years, 2 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/additional-usage-notes/)
 * Hopefully, these notes expand on the documentation page enough to be useful:
 *  * “Replace” is really “Preview”, while “Replace and Save” makes changes.
 *  * The buttons have “>>” at the end of the label, which is usually code for “
   this
    item opens another dialog”. They don’t. They perform their stated actions.
   So don’t press “Replace and Save” until you’re *sure*.
 *  * The screenshots indicate you can edit the replace-preview text, but that
    
   doesn’t work. A post from 2 years ago it hasn’t worked for going back 3 years,
   at least. (So it would seem that development has ceased–but it’s good enough,
   once you suss out regular expressions.)
 *  * That screenshot also shows View, Replace, Edit buttons on replacement text.
   
   But now there are only view/edit buttons, and they apply to the entire post,
 *  * Clicking those buttons erase the current search, so open them in a new tab.
 *  * The bottom row of checkboxes makes a regex search. In a standard regular
    
   expression, any character but [\^$.|?*+() is supposed to be a literal, but many
   non-alphanumeric characters are interpreted by the plugin as special characters,
   including > and /. To prevent the resulting syntax errors, delimit the search
   with the plugin’s @ characters at the start and end.
 *  * A good idiom to know is .*?, because that is a “less greedy” match that doesn’t
   
   automatically match everything it possibly can on a line. It’s still a *bit* 
   greedy, though. When matching (href=”.*?”), the search matched: href=”…” target
   =” In other words, it didn’t stop at first quotation mark it found. (However,
   it did keep from matching entirely unrelated text outside the anchor tag.)
 *  The solution, to get precisely the match I wanted, was (href=”[\S]*”), where
   
   the [\S]* ensures that the matched string has no spaces.
 *  * After installation, the search is found at Tools > Search Regex
 * Final note:
    I installed the plugin, even though it was untested on 4.73, because
   of the strong functionality, and for lack of any real alternatives. So far, so
   good. What it does *really well* is to show you what it finds, and what it will
   change. So all in all, I recommend it.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)

 *  [Mis_Tral](https://wordpress.org/support/users/mis_tral/)
 * (@mis_tral)
 * [9 years ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/additional-usage-notes/#post-9112316)
 * Thanks a ton for this user guide. Without it, I would have never been able to
   figure out how to accomplish what I needed. But just in case somebody else has
   a similar problem to mine, here is what I needed to do:
 * I had code written by another developer/CMS copied from the site I was working
   on (no access to the innards), and it included unnecessary folders and directories
   which I needed to delete. About 500 instances of these.
 * So by using the above guide, I was able to figure out that my search string should
   be:
    @/uploads/music/*.*/files@ where *.* was random numbers, anything from 1
   to 753, and my replace string was /uploads
 * THANKS!

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)

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 * 1 reply
 * 2 participants
 * Last reply from: [Mis_Tral](https://wordpress.org/support/users/mis_tral/)
 * Last activity: [9 years ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/additional-usage-notes/#post-9112316)
 * Status: not a support question