HomeSite's Find and Replace Tools, Part 3

The Extended Find Tool

by Shirley E. Kaiser, M.A.

HomeSite Keyboard Shortcuts
Find	`Ctrl + F`
Replace	`Ctrl + R`
Extended Find	`Shift + Ctrl + F`
Extended Replace	`Shift + Ctrl + R`

In Part 1, you learned how to use HomeSite's Find Tool. The Extended Find Tool has even more powerful capabilities. HomeSite's Extended Find tool finds the text within more than one page (even hundreds of pages) that you designate, whether open or closed. It then provides a report listing of all pages and locations for you, and a double-click will take you to that location. It will also search just one page if you wish, too. Part 3 will explain its usefulness and how to use it effectively.

Note that even though this tutorial was written with HomeSite 4.5.2 in mind that it also applies to HomeSite 5.x versions and to earlier versions.

On this page:

Part 3: The Extended Find Tool

Also within this tutorial, HomeSite's Find and Replace Tools:

So what good is it to find out where a certain term is throughout a document? There are endless possibilities, and here are just a few:

Maybe you don't know or remember if you've used a certain phrase, term, or hyperlink somewhere and you'd like to find out. Rather than scanning each page with your eyes, the Find or Extended Find tools can locate what you need often in fractions of a second, generating a report of each location that you can then click on to go to each one as desired.
Maybe you'll need to update or change a term, phrase, sentence, paragraph, or graphic. Prior to using the Replace or Extended Replace tools you can use the Find or Extended Find tools to evaluate the best approach, ensuring that you replace only what you want replaced.
Maybe you'll want to know where and how many times a certain term or phrase is used to help optimize your Web pages.

For purposes of this tutorial, we'll continue using the 'imagination' term.

From the drop-down menu, Click on Search, and then click on Extended Find.
The Extended Find pop-up box will appear, as shown in the thumbnail image in Example 3.1 to the right.
Type in the 'imagination' term, as shown in Example 3.1 to the right.
Click on image for full version.
Example 3.1
The larger text box allows you to add greater quantities of text to replace if you wish, too.
There are several different options available within the Extended Find pop-up box, with the Default settings shown in Example 3.1 above.
As shown in Example 3.2 to the right, by clicking on the Find what arrow, the menu opens up, allowing you to open an existing search text file or save the current search.
Example 3.2
By clicking on one or more of the checkboxes shown in Example 3.3, you can also provide parameters for your search, such as Match case, Regular expressions, or Skip tags during search.
These choices allow for much more powerful searching, especially the use of regular expressions.
Example 3.3
You can also choose documents to search by clicking on one of the radio button choices under Find where, as shown in Example 3.4. Choose Current document, All open documents, In folder (including or excluding subfolders), or In project (and indicate name and location of Homesite project).
Example 3.4
You can hunt down a particular document on your computer or another disk, you can search for a term in a specific folder with or without subfolders, and you can also choose to search an entire HomeSite project. (If you haven't set up a HomeSite project yet, you're in for a great, helpful feature. We'll address that in another tutorial.)
Make sure the Current document radio button is clicked for now, since you only want to find the 'imagination' terms for your currently open document.
Click on the Find button.
The results will be generated in a Results report in the bottom screen window of HomeSite, as shown in Example 3.5 below.
Click on any of the listings to see the highlighted term and its location within the document.
Click on image for full version. Example 3.5