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GlobalSearchAndReplace
MeatballWiki | RecentChanges | Random Page | Indices | CategoriesA cross-site substitute command would be futile: one cannot simply mass-replace WelcomeRitual? with WelcomeNewcomer.
The script's ready for installation! Get it at http://home.student.uva.nl/johannes.gijsbers/gsar.tar.gz. I'll install it myself if you want to give me a login on the MeatballServer, but here's the things you should look out for if not:
- The CSS url in gsar.tal. It's currently set to an absolute URL because of my not-so-good Apache installation (thank you, Debian unstable), so that probably needs to be changed.
- gsar.tal needs to be in the same directory as gsar.py.
- Like Scott said, you'll probably need install SimpleTAL? and add a sys.path.insert(/path/to/lib) call to gsar.py.
About the script:
- Interface should be fairly obvious.
- Only matches WikiWords to avoid the problem outlined below.
- Ugly in implementation in some places, but this seems unavoidable.
- There's one case which might cause irritation: when one edits a paragraph of a page beyond simply replacing the WikiName and that page is edited by someone else while you're editing (causing an edit conflict), your changes will be lost. However, because both editing beyond replacing and edit conflicts are rare and because you'll only lose a tiny amount of work (a few paragraphs, at most), I can't be bothered to fix it.
There's a problem with any interface that searches and replaces in many pages on one page. When the old string is a substring of the new string (e.g. FooBar? -> InFooBar?), the list doesn't change after saving. This can be solved for WikiWords by only matching the exact WikiWord, but not for arbritrary strings, so I came up with the following:
- If the search string is a WikiWord only match the exact WikiWord. When the search string is not a WikiWord match the search string, with all the problems that has.
But this seems prone to confuse people in the case where the search string is not a WikiWord. So my question is, can anyone come up with a case where the search string is not a WikiWord? Otherwise I'm inclined to limit the search to WikiWords.
CategoryWikiTechnology
Interface sketch 1
MeatballWiki: GlobalSearchAndReplace
Search: [____________________________________________] (Submit)
LinkPattern1
[edit full text]
- Paragraph above occurence.
| Only the paragraph where search term appears. | (Undo changes) |
- Paragraph below occurence.
LinkPattern2
[edit full text]
- Paragraph above occurence.
| First occurence of search term. | (Undo changes) |
- Paragraph below first occurence.
| Second occurence of search term. | (Undo changes) |
- Paragraph below second occurence.
LinkPattern3
[edit full text]
- Paragraph above occurences.
| First occurence of search term. | (Undo changes) |
| Second occurence of search term, which is one paragraph below first occurence. | (Undo changes) |
- Paragraph below occurences.
(Submit)
Interface sketch 2
MeatballWiki: GlobalSearchAndReplace
Search: [____________________________________________] (Submit)
| LinkPattern1 | [Paragraph with search text.] | [edit full text] | (Undo) |
| LinkPattern2 | [Paragraph with search text.] | [edit full text] | (Undo) |
| [Paragraph with search text.] | (Undo) | ||
| LinkPattern3 | [Paragraph with search text.] | [edit full text] | (Undo) |
| [Paragraph with search text.] | (Undo) |
(Submit)