Description
When working on themes and plugins you often notice a piece of text that appears hardcoded into the files, you need to modify it, but you don’t know what theme or plugin it’s in, and certainly not which individual file to look in.
Easily search through your themes, plugins or even WordPress core and be presented with a list of files, the matched text and what line of the file matched your search.
You can then quickly make edits directly in your browser by clicking the link from the search results.
By default a consistency check is performed when making edits to files, this will look for inconsistencies with braces, brackets and parenthesis that are often accidentally left in.
This drastically reduces the risk of breaking your site when making edits, but is in no way an absolute guarantee.
Screenshots
Searching WordPress for the string hello dolly.
Search screen when editing is disabled. 
Having clicked the link for one of the results and being taken to the editor in the browser. 
Smart-Scan has detected an inconsistency in the use of braces.
FAQ
-
Will Smart-Scan guarantee my site is safe when making edits?
-
Although it will do it’s best at detecting incorrect usage of the commonly used symbols (parenthesis, brackets and braces), there is no guarantee every possible error is detected. The best safe guard is to keep consistent backups of your site (even when not making edits).
As of version 1.6, the plugin will check your site health after performing an edit. If the site is returning a site breaking error code, we’ll revert to the previous version of the file.
-
My search is failing and I am told that my search is an invalid pattern
-
This error is only related to regex searches, and is based off how PHP reads your regex string.
When writing your search string, make sure to wrap your search in forward slashes (
/), directly followed by any modifiers like case insensitive (i) that you may want to use.
Reviews
Contributors & Developers
“String locator” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
“String locator” has been translated into 12 locales. Thank you to the translators for their contributions.
Translate “String locator” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
2.5.0 (2022-02-27)
- Fixed a bug where content would have slashes stripped unexpectedly.
- Improved table spacing on search results.
- Improved loopback checks to also check admin access.
- Hardened the search iterator so users can’t accidentally perform unexpected directory traversal.
- Introduced actions and filters in various places to enable extenders, and future enhancements.
- Moved all ajax requests to dedicated REST endpoints.
- Refactored file structure.
Older entries
See changelog.txt for the version history