Search and replace a whole page tree - export XML, modify in Word, import XML

[Patrick O_Connell]

Hello,

Technical writer on the job for about a month and a half. I had the interesting experience of my first face-to-face sit-down with my manager, yesterday.

I reiterated a couple of my key frustrations with Confluence, one of them being not being able to do a search-and-replace in more than one page at a time. Across a space might be too global; across a page tree would be a good fit.

But, of course, "Hey, you wanna do THAT? Buy the plug-in!" I'd like the CSS Stylesheet macro, and the Bob Swift CLI. This is an incredible company in a lot of great ways, but they're gun-shy about plug-ins, and I completely understand. Cost. Maintenance. Possible disruption of what works now.

He had an interesting idea: Export the target page tree to XML, do the search-and-replace in Word (or, I think, any plaintext editor could work), then re-import.

Has anyone actually tried this, though? If so, were you successful? Not? Some of both? Trials and tribulations?

Thank you,
Pat O'Connell
Montreal

[Shannon S]

Hi Pat,

I haven't personally done this, but I know it's possible, but unsupported.

• An example of how to do that is available from How to Copy or Rename a Space.

I wouldn't recommend doing it in Word, but a plain text editor would be fine to use.

Of course, make sure to have a backup and do let us know how it goes or if you have any questions. If you want to test it on your own instance separate from your company's you could setup a Confluence instance for testing using an Evaluation license.

Regards,

Shannon