Thank you for raising this issue. While I can see how this feature would be useful, we have no plans to implement it in the foreseeable future. In order to set expectations, we're closing this request now.

Thanks again for your idea.

Bill Arconati,
Group Product Manager

Hi Craig,

As you know, I've developed a user style that shows markup (tag names), including some "meta data" (attribute values such as link locations). And that user style shows you when you're in a bullet list.

Regarding this:

Ability to search and replace meta data (macro parameters, link and image URLs/locations).

I'm considering developing a "Transformer RT" web page where you paste in RTE content; the web page script grabs the innerHTML of that content, makes it well-formed, and then transforms it using an XSLT stylesheet that (in the initial implementation of this idea) you would paste into a textarea elsewhere on the web page (I already have samples of such XSLT stylesheets). Then the web page presents the transformed RTE content (un-well-unformed) in an inline frame ready to be selected, copied to the clipboard, and pasted back into the Confluence RTE.

Another twinkle in my eye is "Regexer RT": a similarly rudimentary web page harness for applying the JavaScript replace function to content pasted from the Confluence RTE.

The XSLT-based Transformer is probably more useful for markup-based transformations rather than text-based search'n'replace, due to the limitations of the string manipulation functions provided by in-browser XSLT 1.0 functionality, which is what it would be using.

In principle, I think that using regular expressions with (X)HTML is a bad idea, but in practice, Regexer would offer easier ways to manipulate text content (including, say, replacing parts of URLs in attribute values) than Transformer.

Don't know if/when I'll get time to develop these, though.