Find/Replace for URLs

[garrettm30]

In another thread in the Mac bug sub-forum, I briefly mentioned an offshoot idea I had, and a couple other users agreed it might be good to repeat the idea here as a feature request.

The request is to be able to use find and replace on hyperlink target URLs. For people who have documents with numerous links, this could be a good time-saver. Here is an example scenario. Imagine that a company reorganized its website language scheme from “www.domain.com/lang/” to “lang.domain.com”. A find/replace of URLs could fix all such instances in document right away.

My first thought is that it is potentially an easy thing to add as an additional Find/Replace mode along with Regular Expressions, etc., my assumption being that it would be minimal additional development.

@A_B_C liked the general suggestion, but he had these additional comments on an alternate implementation, which I hope he won’t mind if I copy over to this feature request, as I believe it is relevant to this thread.

I would second your suggestion regarding find/replace for URLs. Maybe it would make sense, however, to add this option to the Hyperlinks Panel, not to merge it into the current Find/Replace Panel. For since we have to discern between

• links (the strings between the tags <a>…</a> in HTML)

and 

• link target strings (the strings between the quotes of the href="…" attribute in HTML),

we will also have to discern between

• doing a find/replace on links

and

• doing a find/replace on link target strings.

Hence, it would feel natural for me to add the find/replace option you have in mind to the Hyperlinks Panel rather than to merge it as a new option into the current Find/Replace Panel, as the latter one operates directly on stories in a document. Furthermore, I think it would be necessary then that the Hyperlink Panel would not only show a list of the links in a document, but also a list of the corresponding link target strings. Maybe in columns, side by side.

More generally spoken, I would believe that hyperlinks, cross-references, etc. should be manageable through an interface similar to the current Resource Manager. As soon as you add more than a couple of links to a document, the current panel-based or “studio”-based approach results in an overcrowded interface that is hard to survey.

Alex