Group-editing links in Help and Manual

[Sean Godley]

Hi all,

I'm currently updating some manuals, as our website domain has changed. I need to update all external links from the current domain to the new domain. Is there a quick way to do this, for example with Find and Replace?

Many thanks,

Sean

[Tim Green]

Hi Sean,

You can't do this from within Help & Manual but you can use a multi-file search and replace tool on the source code of your topics, provided your project is saved in the uncompressed HMXP format so that you can access the individual files. You can save to HMXP with Save As... in the File menu. Choose an empty folder to save in (you can add other files and folders to it later if necessary, for example for your images etc).

First you need to create "before" and "after" examples of what you need to do in the HM editor, then look in the XML Source view (tab below the main editor window) to see the XML code you need to find and replace. Then use a multi-file search and replace tool on the topic files in the /Topics sub-folder in your project folder to make the changes:

IMPORTANT: Always make a backup before doing this! Automated global changes are always a little bit risky.

If you don't have a suitable editor for this here's a list of ones you could use:

Notepad++ (free, also an excellent code editor):
http://notepad-plus-plus.org/

Notepad++ also supports multi-file regular expression searching, if you feel comfortable with that, but it is more limited than PowerGREP but its search and replace is fine for this kind of task. It is also one of the best code editors available, at any price. I use it for all my web programming.

PowerGREP:
http://www.powergrep.com/

If you feel comfortable with regular expressions PowerGREP is the best tool available, on any platform and at any price. It is a little pricey, but if you do a lot complex searching in multiple files (also for programming work) it will pay for itself subjectively in a single afternoon. The RegexBuddy tool from the same company (http://www.regexbuddy.com/) is also the best interactive tool available for defining and testing regular expressions, and its documentation is quite literally the best tutorial and introduction to regular expressions available anywhere.

Visual Studio Code:
https://code.visualstudio.com/download

This is the free, multi-platform code editor from Microsoft and it is genuinely excellent, although perhaps a little bit overkill for just this task.

GrepWin (free, can only search plain text files)
https://tools.stefankueng.com/grepWin.html

[Sean Godley]

Hi Tim,

Okay that's great, thanks for the help - will give that a try now.

Sean