Thanks to all my time spent this year on learning JavaScript, I've come to the conclusion that so many little things can be automated. And powerful programs, like Dreamweaver, are just waiting for its users to take advantage of their automation features.

Today, while coding at work, I delete 64 hyperlink references that had been set up as placeholders during a project in development. As I looked over all of these, I thought, "wouldn't it be great if I could just do a simple search-and-replace with regex??" After fiddling with the possibility, I finally googled it and found that Dreamweaver did, indeed, have a quick post about searching with regex.

Here is what I was able to do in Adobe Dreamweaver CC:

Using

wellness/\*\w+\.pdf

I was able to search out:

• the reference to the "wellness" folder,
• followed by a forward-slash (escaped with a backslash),
• followed by any alphanumeric character that occurred more than once,
• and followed by a ".pdf" (the dot had to be escaped, too).

Thanks, JavaScript, for teaching me the importance and usefulness of Regular Expressions in my work! It saved me some time and annoyance. And thank you, Dreamweaver, for making a powerful web design/dev tool.

DW Power User Level: unlocked.