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Search Regex

By John Godley

Description

Search Regex adds a powerful set of search and replace functions to WordPress posts, pages, custom post types, and other data sources. These go beyond the standard searching capabilities, and allow you to search and replace almost any data stored on your site. In addition to simple searches you have the full power of PHP’s regular expressions at your disposal.

You can use this to do things like:
– Help migrate a site from one domain to another
– Update URLs in links and images
– Perform site-wide changes

Search Regex handles small and large sites.

What can I search?

You can search:
– Posts
– Pages
– Any custom post type
– Comments (including spam)
– Users
– Meta data
– WordPress options
– Supported plugins (such as Redirection)

Full regular expression support is provided, and you can capture data and use it in the replacement.

Replace Matched Data

Once a match has been made you can replace it with a popup replacer. You can also replace all matches in a database row, and you can replace all matches across your database.

Additionally, if you need to make your change with context of the surrounding content you can use the inline editor to edit the full context.

Note that it is your responsibility to ensure that replacements in serialized data is valid.

Support

Please submit bugs, patches, and feature requests to:

https://github.com/johngodley/search-regex

Please submit translations to:

https://translate.wordpress.org/projects/wp-plugins/search-regex

Documentation

Full documentation can be found on the Search Regex site.

Screenshots

  • Search options
  • Inline search and replace
  • Inline editor

Installation

The plugin is simple to install:

  1. Download search-regex.zip
  2. Unzip
  3. Upload search-regex directory to your /wp-content/plugins directory
  4. Go to the plugin management page and enable the plugin
  5. Configure the options from the Tools/Search Regex page

You can find full details of installing a plugin on the plugin installation page.

Reviews

The best of the kind

June 4, 2021
I have tried many other search & replace plugins, this one is by far the best. Thanks!

Good plugin with cautions

May 10, 2021
WP 5.7 PHP 7.4.16 MySQL 10.3.28-MariaDB Once I got it to work, this plugin did a smooth and swift job of regex searches and deletes, on around 450 posts. Please note I was taking a bit of a chance because it's not tested with WP 5.7, but the only problem I found was that if I tried to save a regex as a preset, it failed with a DB error and, worse, it didn't find any matches after that unless I left it alone for a few hours and then reloaded the page. Naturally I tested my searches on a staging clone of my site first. It's *VERY* important to note that this plugin uses PHP regex syntax, which isn't exactly the same as BASH. Using BASH regex syntax didn't work. Handy tip: use the ".{99999}" syntax as much as possible, it's faster than more precise matching. Final note: be patient once you've checked your search and kicked off the replace / delete. It can be a good few seconds before it reports anything, and the progress meter proceeds in stages with pauses once it does. And to the dev(s): thanks for a great piece of work! Please bring it up to speed with WP 5.7? Best, Joy

Saved me Hours!

May 3, 2021
I had a lot of old content to remove inside the posts such as manually inserted ad code, various shortcodes, and forms. It saved me hours of work with its find a remove function. Thanks!

It is simple, powerful, and saves the day.

March 9, 2021
This plugin lets you search and replace site wide content and post easily saving you a lot of time hunting down the content page after page. It works out of the box with an effective interface. Thank you for the work.

Great BULK regex search and replace plugin

February 19, 2021
Great work! Got to spend some time on regex setup, but it helped to save a lot of my time...10k internal links replaced in half an hour. It could take up to one day with using other search and replace plugins which don't allow using regular extensions.
Read all 74 reviews

Contributors & Developers

“Search Regex” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Contributors

“Search Regex” has been translated into 5 locales. Thank you to the translators for their contributions.

Translate “Search Regex” into your language.

Interested in development?

Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.

Changelog

2.4.1 – 29th November 2020

  • Fix replacements with a backslashed character

2.4 – 29th October 2020

  • Support multi-line search phrases
  • Improve progress bar animation
  • Add option to ignore draft posts
  • Improve support for serialized data – show it in the UI, and don’t show an error
  • Fix source flags being sent when source is changed

2.3.3 – 13th September 2020

  • Fix replace in ‘all post types’
  • Fix duplicate sources when deselecting a post source

2.3.2 – 8th September 2020

  • Fix locale pluralization throwing an error

2.3.1 – 7th September 2020

  • Fix locales not loading
  • Fix startup error on some sites

2.3 – 6th September 2020

  • Add option to set a default preset
  • Fix global replace not working in post meta
  • Fix replace value not being used in a preset

2.2.1 – 22nd July 2020

  • Fix regular expression search having no pagination buttons
  • Fix saving a preset with no search phrase showing an error
  • Fix inline editor not working on sources with an underscore
  • Add edit link for TablePress tables
  • Increase maximum per-page size

2.2 – 18th July 2020

  • Add presets
  • Save a search as a preset
  • Lock fields in a search
  • Create custom search templates
  • Fix post meta search

2.1 – 6th June 2020

  • Support searching and replacing in multiple sources
  • Improve regex search and replace speed
  • Row actions have moved to a dropdown
  • Fix HTML entities in row titles
  • Handle unknown post types
  • Fix global replace showing 0% progress
  • Add Japanese locale
  • Add Dutch locale

2.0.1 – 11th May 2020

  • Comment title now takes you to comment page
  • Improve regex performance when data has large gaps
  • Use correct contact address
  • Support \1 as well as $1 in regular expression captures

2.0 – 9th May 2020

  • Release version 2.0, a ground-up rewrite
  • Handles any size of database without memory issues or server timeouts
  • New and responsive UI with inline replacing of individual phrases
  • Match replacements are updated in real-time, including regular expressions
  • Edit an entire database row with the inline editor
  • Supports custom post types
  • Groups columns from one database together
  • Search in third-party plugins (currently Redirection)
  • Improved regular expressions without needing delimiters

1.4.16 – 21st Nov 2014 and before to 2007

  • Old versions

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Issues resolved in last two months:

1 out of 2

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