ADDITIONAL USAGE NOTES

Hopefully, these notes expand on the documentation page enough to be useful:

* “Replace” is really “Preview”, while “Replace and Save” makes changes.

* The buttons have “>>” at the end of the label, which is usually code for “this
item opens another dialog”. They don’t. They perform their stated actions.
So don’t press “Replace and Save” until you’re *sure*.

* The screenshots indicate you can edit the replace-preview text, but that
doesn’t work. A post from 2 years ago it hasn’t worked for going back
3 years, at least. (So it would seem that development has ceased–but it’s
good enough, once you suss out regular expressions.)

* That screenshot also shows View, Replace, Edit buttons on replacement text.
But now there are only view/edit buttons, and they apply to the entire post,

* Clicking those buttons erase the current search, so open them in a new tab.

* The bottom row of checkboxes makes a regex search. In a standard regular
expression, any character but [\^$.|?*+() is supposed to be a literal, but
many non-alphanumeric characters are interpreted by the plugin as special
characters, including > and /. To prevent the resulting syntax errors, delimit
the search with the plugin’s @ characters at the start and end.

* A good idiom to know is .*?, because that is a “less greedy” match that doesn’t
automatically match everything it possibly can on a line. It’s still a *bit*
greedy, though. When matching (href=”.*?”), the search matched:
href=”…” target=”
In other words, it didn’t stop at first quotation mark it found. (However, it did
keep from matching entirely unrelated text outside the anchor tag.)

The solution, to get precisely the match I wanted, was (href=”[\S]*”), where
the [\S]* ensures that the matched string has no spaces.

* After installation, the search is found at Tools > Search Regex

Final note:
I installed the plugin, even though it was untested on 4.73, because of the strong functionality, and for lack of any real alternatives. So far, so good. What it does *really well* is to show you what it finds, and what it will change. So all in all, I recommend it.