We often use the Find and Replace tool (CTRL + F) to search for words, in our context, tags, elements, properties and so on in our page. But the same dialog box offers a cool feature of setting HTML rules in your search. These HTML rules let you add conditions as to where in your code to search. Let us take a look at how that can be done.

Follow these steps to set HTML rules for searching -

1. Do either of the following
   • To search within a single page, open the page.
   • To search the entire site, open the site.
   • To search more than one page in a website, open the site and in the Folder List panel or the Site View, select the pages. Else open all those pages you want to search.
2. Go to the Edit menu and choose Find… to find text, and Replace… to replace text. Both would launch the same Find and Replace dialog box, with different tabs selected by default.



3. Click on the ‘HTML Rules…’ button. The HTML Rules dialog box would be prompted.



4. Click on ‘New rule…’ In the drop down box (left bottom corner of the window, choose to set the rule ‘Inside tag’ or ‘Not inside tag’. In either case, select a tag, from the other drop down. The rule would be created.



5. To configure the rule, click on the ‘New rule…’ (appears as a child under the rule we created above, in the tree view). Choose the options in the bottom left corner for the rule. They are as follows:
   a.       With attribute: to search inside a tag with the given attribute. For example, inside tag <p>, search for only those tags that have attribute class = content_text.
   b.      Without attribute: to search inside a tag without the given attribute. For example, inside tag <p>, search for all other tags except for the ones with attribute class = content_text.
   c.       Containing: to search only if it is in another text or tag that you specify.
   d.      Not Containing: to search only if it is not another text or tag that you specify.
   e.      Inside Tag: to search only if it is in a tag that you specify.
   f.        Not Inside Tag: to search only if it is not in a tag that you specify. 
6. To delete a rule, choose ‘Delete rule’ and to delete all the rules, choose ‘Delete all’.

Incremental search is a user interface interaction method to progressively search for and filter through text. In Expression Web, Incremental Search, searches the text as you type, and as soon as a match is found it immediately presents it to you. Incremental Search gives you an advantage, to stop short of typing the entire word or phrase you are looking for.

How to search incrementally?

1.       Open the page or CSS file you want to search and place the cursor where you want to begin your search.

2.       Go to Edit > Incremental Search. Your cursor would now change to .

3.       Now just type in the characters you want to search. The status bar would display the characters as you type them, and the first occurrence of the letters you have typed, would be highlighted in the page.

4.       To locate and move to the next occurrence of the characters press F3 and to go to the previous instance press SHIFT + F3.

To stop the incremental search either press Esc, or Enter or just click somewhere in your page.