Search and Replace - did the job
My other personal blogging site use to reside within a sub-directory of the domain - http://superjacent.net with no clean url's. A few days ago I moved the drupal installation back to the root of the domain and turned on clean url's. The site is now accessed at http://superjacent.net.
Now, this is where the 'Search and Replace' function came in very handy. Quite a few of my posts contained internal links to other pages of the site. Those links included a reference to the sub-directory cms and the non clean url ?q=node\. References to most images were relative, adopting this format ./files/image002.jpg.
Using the Search and Replace utility I was able to:
Replace /cms/?q=node/ with /node/, and
Replace /cms/node/ with /node/, and
Replace ./files with /files.
The first two replacements were not absolutely necessary as I've got RewriteRules in place but the third was necessary as the images were no longer displayed with the ./ (dot slash) relative reference, due to there no longer being a sub-directory in use.
The upshot is, it worked. As you can imagine, you have to be very careful with your selection of text to be replaced and so I highly recommend backing up first. I'll say it again, BACKUP FIRST.
Thanks DU it certainly replaces the phrases correctly but the problem is that the effect of enforcing the teaser is not done. The teaser and main body of the post are two separate fields. All that happens is that the replacement takes place and nothing else. After this change, if you were to then edit the page within Drupal (without editing anything) and then save, the effect of the 'break' command will take effect.
This though, has highlighted an area for improvement. It shouldn't be too difficult to account for this.
The Search and Replace feature of the converter has come to my rescue yet again.
To cut a long story short I've changed this site from prime357.org to prime357.net. In the process I detected that all internal links and images were referenced in absolute terms and not relative. This meant that images were not displayed and links were not valid.
I had two choices, either replace all the absolute links with new absolute links, therefore accounting for the new site or replace them with relative links. I opted for the second option, relative links. I recall that I enforced absolute links months ago as some rss readers wouldn't correctly display relative links, now I don't care.
Here are the search and replace strings used to change from absolute to relative references:
Search for : <a href="http://prime357.org/
Replace with : <a href="/
Search for: <img src="http://prime357.org/
Replace with : <img src="/
Version 1.04 correctly made the above replacements and all images and links are correctly implemented.
During this exercise I noticed I hadn't included a search and replace feature for comments. I quickly slapped together functions to address comments, Version 1.05 (yet to be released), and all replacements went through smoothly.
As regards the look and feel of the Search and Replace feature, I agree, it's not the best, but it gets the job done. I will be addressing the look and feel of this feature in the next version or two.
Oh, nearly forgot though I've mentioned this before, BACKUP first, it can be a very dangerous feature.
Another useful tip. Use the replace feature to replace all the
<!--more-->tags with Drupal's version<!--break-->.These are the teaser tags.