Strip old html table from csv file with wildcards?

[888Knivesrus]

We have about 11,000 products in our database. Many of these products have an old table contain old navigation buttons that we built, inside a table. The buttons image names vary, as to the links to different categories on our site, but the html is consistant to a point in the first href tag. Is there a way to search and replace where any cell containing a table definition starting with this data can be stripped out?

Example:

The tables all start as such:

<table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="2" cellpadding="2">
<tr>
<td height="38">
<div align="center"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2"><a href=omitted link due to less than 10 posts

and of course end with </table>

Everything in between varies according to the category. I would want to replace html matching with blank or nothing.

I apologize if this in in the wrong forum.

DC

[morestar]

Hi I'm confused as to what you want. Could you clarify? I know you want to perform a find and replace - are you talking about a global find and replace? and to what exactly?

My apologies for not understanding...

[DaveSawers]

So you've dumped the table to a csv file and now you want to make lots of edits on it so you can subsequently reload the table from the csv. Right?

If so, any decent text editor allows you to create macros to do complex repetitive replaces.

I use the Crimson editor. Used to use PFE but that disappeared. Some old timers like Emacs but that's not for the faint hearted.

[Smeagol]

You mention variable content but in the example you give I cannot see what the variable components might be.

A good old "Search and replace" on you files should do the trick. But if there are variations then maybe a regular expression search and replace may be needed.