Search and replace text in Drupal nodes

Question

A client has recently been acquired by a new group and has requested that I do a search and replace for their name (for example Foo Housing Trust Group and Foo Housing Trust) and replace it with their new name (for example New Group).

Answers for How to fix millions of Alt Text are missing on body content? suggest to use the Search and Replace Scanner module.

Would using that module better than running a database query?

Answer 1

A possible alternative to achieve what you're trying to do, is to use a combination of these (commonly used) modules: Rules, Views and VBO.

With these modules in place, you could implement (for each of the fields that your question is related to) a variation of the solution described in my answer to "How to bulk update select list fields?", i.e.:

• Create a Rules Component with a Rules Condition to checks if the field contains the string you're interested in (probably using a "text comparison" with a "regular expression" to find all variations).
• Create a VBO enabled view of all nodes to be checked, whereas you'll use the Rules Component as your custom VBO action.

Repeat the above for each field (simply by adapting your Rules Component for each of these fields).

PS: I'm assuming this question is above D7 ...

Done ...