Find and Replace

[nancym]

When editing a "page" I would like to "find and replace" in the rich text editor.  Is this feature available?  "ctl-F" only gets me the browser assistance.  

[Chris_Hofer · Accepted solution]

Good morning,  @nancym  Welcome to the Canvas Community.  Thanks for posting your question.  I am not aware of any "Find and Replace" feature available within the Canvas interface.  However, and I know this is a bit of a work-around, you could use something like the "Notepad" program (Microsoft Notepad - Wikipedia) included with the Windows OS to do this.  You would first need to copy the text from your Canvas page into Notepad.  Then, you can select "Edit" >> "Replace" (or Ctrl+H) to find and replace whatever you want.  Then, paste that text back into your Canvas page.  The downside to this...aside from the obvious copy/paste...is that if you had links in your page and pasted the content into Notepad, you would have to re-create those links once you pasted the text from Notepad back to your Canvas page.

I hope this helps a bit, Nancy.  Sing out if you need any other assistance on this...thanks!

[Chris_Hofer · Accepted solution]

Good morning,  @nancym  Welcome to the Canvas Community.  Thanks for posting your question.  I am not aware of any "Find and Replace" feature available within the Canvas interface.  However, and I know this is a bit of a work-around, you could use something like the "Notepad" program (Microsoft Notepad - Wikipedia) included with the Windows OS to do this.  You would first need to copy the text from your Canvas page into Notepad.  Then, you can select "Edit" >> "Replace" (or Ctrl+H) to find and replace whatever you want.  Then, paste that text back into your Canvas page.  The downside to this...aside from the obvious copy/paste...is that if you had links in your page and pasted the content into Notepad, you would have to re-create those links once you pasted the text from Notepad back to your Canvas page.

I hope this helps a bit, Nancy.  Sing out if you need any other assistance on this...thanks!

[JonathanWigley]

If Canvas is built on WordPress, there is a plugin for Wordpress that can run a search and replace in the database. Instructure would need to install this plugin (https://wordpress.org/plugins/better-search-replace/) and make it available to course developers in the dashboard. This would mean one could change multiple pages within a course at the click of a button. For example, let's say a course code changes from something like BAMZ1234 to BAMZ4321 one can run a search and replace command with this plugin and it will change all instances of the first code in the database to the second code. One can obviously do the same with page content and things like dates or URL's etc... any content can be searched and replaced with this tool without having to go into any content within Canvas itself. It would be highly worth it for Canvas to make this tool available to course developer role. 

[ArnaudTemme]

Did anything happen with that brilliant suggestion, @JonathanWigley ?

[joshua_hogue1]

A MUCH easier solution is to use the Google Chrome extension called Find & Replace. It works great with Canvas and is super fast to find and replace text on the page.

[dd · Accepted solution]

This works, thanks.

Note: each 'find' word is highlighted yet each paragraph may have 3 highlighted words and as soon as I replace the 1st of 3 highlighted words in that paragraph, the remaining 2 highlights disappear - so make sure you scope out the other words before you click 'paste'...🤓