Find and Replace Issue Help Requested.

Question

Hi all. I've been digging around for a couple of days and
can't seem to figure this one out. For starters, I have already
looked at the Regular Expression syntax and tried the MS word
clean-up option, but no luck. We have about 1,500 pages of content.
They are in DNN, so the pages are created dynamically.
Unfortunately, the page content was written in Word and then dumped
in DNN. We are trying to clean up the pages. We are grabbing the
content from Dot Net Nuke and putting it into Dreamweaver 8.0.2.
Then we are manually cleaning out things like:
<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns =
"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
and
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"
align=left>
We are using the Find and Replace funtion in Dreamweaver to
clean out these commands, but I know from the documentation, there
is an easier way to clean these pages.
Bottom Line: Since the pages are dynamically built, I know I
have to grab the page content and put it in Dreamweaver manually
and then put it back in DNN, but I am trying to find a way (using
Regular Expressions or something) to look for all the little
variances of MSO, <?XML, etc. in a straight shot. I would like
to find a way to use a wild card to look for all tags that have MSO
or Microsoft or ?XML in them and then replace them with a null
value. From what I can tell, the Find would have to use a wildcard
because the advanced find features don't carry what I am looking
for. Something like Find \<?xml * [<-wildcard] to \> to
grab the entire tag. The Find tag command doesn't work because the
tags I need aren't listed. Also, because the content is dynamic, I
can't do a Fins and Replace against the entire site for these
commands, but it would be nice to "Find" all of these items with a
single pass since the "Replace" value is always null.
The wildcard syntax and multiple Find instances are the main
questions. The wildcards seem to be character or space specific.
Sorry for the long explanation - I just don't want to waste
anyone's time typing responses to things I've already tried to do.
Thanks in advance for any help. This is my first time back in
the forums in about 4 years.

Answer 1

sadamec1 wrote:
> Well David, you Findmaster - it worked! (At least it
found and highlighted the
> code). Now, I need to dig through what you sent me and
compare it against my
> regular expression definitions to find out how to grab
the rest of these
> phrases. You're the best. Thank you!
Glad that it did the trick. Just to help you understand what
I did,
there are two main sections, as follows:
<\?xml[^>]+>
and
<[^>]+(?=class=Mso)[^>]+>
They are separated by a vertical pipe (|), so they simply act
as
alternatives.
The first one searches for <?xml followed by anything
except a closing
bracket until it reaches the first closing bracket.
The second one is more complex. It begins with this:
<[^>]+
This simply looks for an opening bracket followed by anything
other than
a closing bracket. What makes it more intelligent is the next
bit:
(?=class=Mso)
This does a forward search for "class=Mso". It's then
followed by this
again:
[^>]+>
That finds anything except a closing bracket followed by a
closing bracket.
The bit that you need to experiment with is (?=...). It's
technically
called a "forward lookaround". The effect is that the second
half of the
regex finds <....class=Mso....>.
David Powers
Adobe Community Expert
Author, "Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8" (friends of ED)
http://foundationphp.com/