You can also do a find & replace in multiple eaf files. To do so, click Search > Find & Replace in Multiple Files... from the main window of ELAN. A warning message will appear, telling you find & replace actions cannot be undone. So make sure you have backups of the files you will work on, and click Yes to continue. A dialog will appear, looking like this:

Figure 382. Find & replace in multiple files dialog

First, select a domain to work with by clicking Define search domain. This will open the Search Domain dialog (see the section called “How to select multiple files” for more info about setting up a domain). Select a domain containing the eaf files you want to do the search & replace action on, or create a new domain. Click Load to load the chosen domain.

Back in the multiple file find & replace dialog, the eaf files and their location are now visible in the top-half of the dialog. You can select if all tiers must be searched, or a selection. When you choose the latter, a dialog with all the tiers from the files will pop-up:

Figure 383. Tier selection dialog

Check the tiers you want to include in the find and replace function and select OK. Next, fill out the query you want to find and replace. You can also search by means of regular expressions (see REGULAR EXPRESSION SEARCH), and/or do a case sensitive search, by checking either or both options.

In the Replace by field, fill out the desired text that will be put in place of the found results. Finally, click Find and Replace to start the process. When done, a process report will be shown, with information regarding the inspected files, the number of hits and the number of files that have changed.

Figure 384. Process report dialog