Save, Format, View Dreamweaver Search Results

For as long as I can remember I have wanted a formatted, printable report of Dreamweaver search results. Since Dreamweaver’s “Save Report” of the results pane is an xml file I have always been too lazy to pursue it. I have finally put forth a little effort to generate one using XSLT. XSLT stands for XSL Transformations. XSLT “transforms” XML documents into other formats, like XHTML.

Download the search_results.xsl file here. Unzip it. It is the file that will perform the styling of your XML results file. Hang on to it for now.

Open Dreamweaver’s “Find and Replace” window (Command + F). Enter your search criteria and click “Find All”.

.DW Finder Window

In the “Results” pane click the save icon.
DW Results Pane

You can accept Dreamweaver’s default file name or give the file a name related to your search. I’ll call mine Post.xml. Save it in the same directory where you put search_results.xsl. Open Post.xml (or whatever you called it) with Dreamweaver and add the one line of code annotated below with the red arrow.

XSL code

Now open your Post.xml file with a web browser such as Safari. You should see your search report formatted as follows:

Post.xml

You now have a nice printable report complete with results total.

May 23rd, 2008


10 Responses to “Save, Format, View Dreamweaver Search Results”

  1. Jock Says:
    September 27th, 2008 at 7:18 am

    Just a wee note to thank you for posting “Save, Format, View Dreamweaver Search Results”.
    I was exactly what I was looking and saved me a lot of trouble.
    Best wishes,
    =Jock=

  2. Edgar Says:
    November 15th, 2008 at 5:24 pm

    Great tool man !! I don’t know why dreamweaver people offer other format than XML to save this reports….

    Thanks a lot.
    Edgar

  3. Shauna Says:
    January 6th, 2009 at 1:55 pm

    thank you, thank you, thank you!

  4. Rochelle Says:
    January 28th, 2009 at 11:47 am

    Fantastic! Thank you so much :-)

  5. Larry Geiger Says:
    January 12th, 2010 at 4:25 pm

    You da man!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    Thanks

  6. namuami Says:
    January 18th, 2010 at 2:51 am

    Thank you very much. I was troubled by this problem for a long time. Still another problem. Is there any possibility to display or save exactly only the red underlined parts in the search results ? I always use DW to search a lot of expression examples fron htm format novels and it takes me a lot of time to sort out the exact results I need. Would you mail me(namuami@163.com) if you can do me this great favor. Thousand Thanks.

  7. tGirl Says:
    May 24th, 2010 at 9:18 am

    I don’t get the option to save after I do a search. Any suggestions? I am using DW CS4.

    Thanks

  8. Chris Simmons Says:
    May 26th, 2010 at 6:13 am

    See if you have an icon in the search tab like the one in the second screen-shot of the post (looks like a little floppy disk). Until you have performed a search the little disk icon will be grayed out.

  9. Stefan Pausch Says:
    May 26th, 2010 at 10:53 am

    Thanks alot for the XSL!

  10. joel Says:
    May 28th, 2010 at 10:44 pm

    Thank you!!!

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