by Donald Herion

Recently I had the 'fun' assignment of cleaning up a number of 'Word HTML' documents for use on a web site. Thankfully, Dreamweaver's 'Clean Up Word HTML' command completed about 80 percent of the task. But that still left a sticky 20 percent to be edited. To repair the remaining offending code I decided to use the 'Find' and 'Replace' commands. I'm sure most Dreamweaver users out there have used the 'Replace' tool to remove problem tags or text. Unfortunately, the usual 'Replace' command was not refined enough for my needs. I was going to have to explore the power of editing individual tags within the 'Replace' tool.

The document in question had a number of <p class=Bullets>, <p class=ChapterTitle align="center'> and <p class=numberedbullets> tags I wanted to replace with a simple <p> tag. To accomplish this with minimal labor, I followed these steps:

I selected Edit > Replace. Under 'Find What' I chose 'Tag.'

Select 'Tag'

Then I selected the specific tag I wanted to affect. I chose 'p' for paragraph.

Select the HTML 'Tag' to be edited

After that, I had to set the parameters for the <p> tag. These parameters available include with attribute, without attribute, containing, not containing, inside tag, and not inside tag. I chose 'With Attribute' and 'class.'

Select 'class' attribute.

Then I selected 'any value' so all 'class' tags would be affected by my 'Replace' edit.

Select '[any value]'

Finally I selected the 'Action' to be performed on the chosen tag. I selected 'Replace Tag & Contents' with new tag '<p>.'

Select 'Replace Tag & Contents'