Find and Replace text across multiple documents

A colleague of mine build a static html website a few years ago. He slowly but steadily created hundreds of html pages which was great for him because he could simply use one already finished file as a template for a new one. It did however pose a problem as well. Updating information across all files was very time consuming. Think of extending the copyright notice each year, adding advertisement to the websites or changing the navigation.

What he obviously needs is a program that can find and replace text across multiple documents. Ideally it would be a software that would be easy to use and would require just a few clicks to achieve the desired results. One of the applications that can deliver a speedy way of replacing text across multiple documents is Text Crawler.

Ideally you only need to fill out the old and new text, the location of the documents and the type of documents that you want to change. Text Crawler scans all documents of that type for the phrase that you have entered and displays all occurrences in a list that contains the file name and location as well as the line in the document with the match.

The text is only replaced in files checked by the user. Some of the supported file types are txt, log, php, htm, css and ini. What I like is the option to create backup files before replacing the text in the documents and support for Regular Expressions. A great feature is the Regular Expression Tester that allows you to load a text file and test if the regular expression is replacing the text correctly.

The process itself is very fast, takes just a short time to replace the text in the selected documents.