Search Regex Lets You Edit Multiple WordPress Posts With Ease

The people who don’t really have that much knowledge of how to create dynamic websites, PHP, hosting and etc or are new to this ‘wordpress website’ thing make a big mistake by installing tons of plugins and themes. Most of the people don’t even know what a certain plugin does but they install it simply because other people did! Installing too many plugins causes conflicts and slow downs, which is obviously not what you want!

Sometimes it happens that some certain plugin adds extra text or content to each of your post for example a certain plugin adds ‘tag [tags]tag1, tag2, tag3, tag4[/tags]’ at the bottom of each post. Now what will you do to remove this from the post? Remove it manually one by one, of course. But now, thanks to a plugin named Search Regex you can search and replace in all post content.

You can search by using Search Regex plugin in two methods. The first search is an exact search that porves to be very helpful when your are required to change characters or words that are static. For instance, you want to point all images URL from my website to CDN which is from www.yoursitename.cc/images/ to cdn.yoursitename.cc/images/. All you are required to do is to specify www.yoursitename.cc/images/ as the search pattern and cdn.yoursitename.cc/images/ as the replace pattern. Clicking the Replace & Save button will make the alterations on all post content all by itself.

Search regex

It is better to click on the Search button first to make sure that you have specified the accurate search pattern. The benefit of this is that Search button only searches but doesn’t replace or alter anything.

As all the tags are dissimilar words and are not static, you will have to use Regular Expressions for deleting tags. But the thing is that tags start with [tags] and end with [/tags]. So the correct Regex which will spotlight all the tags.

The following steps will tell you how to do it:

  • Choose the source as Post Content
  • Specify the Search Pattern as ^\[tags\].*\]^
  • Do not alter the Replace Pattern and leave it as blank.
  • Click the Replace & Save button

And Voila! The tags will be removed from hundreds of posts just like magic.

This amazing plugin makes these alterations straight to the database, so if your are confused on what you are doing then I would recommend that you always use the Search button to verify if you are searching the accurate pattern. If you want to be super safe then then backup backup the database so that it can be restored it if something goes wrong. Deactivate and uninstall the plugin after you are done with all the work you want to do using this plugin, as there is no reason to keep it active all the time.

[ Search Regex WordPress Plugin]


About the author

With a passion for Knowledge, Smashinghub has been created to explore things like Free Resources For Designers, Photographers, Web Developers and Inspiration.

Twitter Visit author website

Subscribe to Smashing Hub


Comments are closed.