Adding ALT tags to an existing site

Hi,
I have a website made up of 400+ pages all of which have images without alt tags. 90% of the images are layout graphics and only need the alt"" added.
Is there any software/plugin that will automate this for me so I don't need to edit each page of my website manually.
Thank You.

Sorry to say this, but I think that you will need to manually just add the alt.

No, no you won't. Pick a platform of your choice, such as PHP. Make use of PHP's File functions, then mix some regex in and you will have a script that you can use to automate the addition of your alt variables. Have a look into it and post back if you get stuck.

You can do this pretty easily using DW's Find and Replace.

Just search: Entire Current Local Site
Find: <img[space]
Replace with: <img alt=""[space]

And that will find all img tags on the site, and replace with the same img tag, and add the alt tag.

That would be a horrible idea for 400+ pages. Take so long.

Actually it wouldn't take that long at all. The engine it uses is pretty good. I've done Find and Replace on sites with 1500+ pages and it worked great!

I think that PHP-newbs idea of PHP would work great. His pages would have to have the img tag set up ALL like
<img alt="" src="whatev.jpg">
Otherwise, your example won't work I think.

But why write extra code and spend time testing/debugging when a program already contains the task needed.

Agreed, not all images have the same dimensions, or filenames, but all image tags do have something in common. They all do start with <img

So if the user was to do a search for <img and did "Find All" he would get a # result of how many results were found matching the <img criteria. Remember this #.

Now if were to "Find" <img and "Relace" with <img alt="" we aren't extracting anything, we are searching for a common tag used by all image tags, and we are adding to that tag along with a space so as not to mess up the attributes assignment.

After you get finished doing the Global F&R, check the # of results it replace and see if it matched the original # of results found, described in the 2 paragraphs above.

If you really want to make sure, you can go into the Advanced Find and Replace and do even more matching, with certain criteria. DW's F&R feature is quite extensive, and it was made for task exactly as described by the OP.

Try out! Just copy some source code from a large site, and try a simple find and replace. Its def a time saver once you get more comfortable using the feature.

HTH's explain it a little better.

**Edit:
Want to add after I re-read your post.

if a user has an image tag like:
<img src="whatev.jpg">

I am only going to match the first 5 characters
<img[space]

Anything after that I am not touching and it retains it's orginal content.

So if I did a global F&R on the above tag, after the F&R is done, it would look like:
<img alt="" src="whatev.jpg">

Because I replaced:
<img[space]

With:
<img alt=""[space]

Reason why I include the space is so the attributes don't butt up against each other.

I was just thinking general purpose with regards to a script. A grep and replace would be faster for a one-time issue.

I might use both a text editor with a search and replace in multiple files feature and PHP to do this, because copying that many files via FTP would take a while.

The alt attribute doesn't have to be first either, but it is simpler to do it that way.

You could use Sed, if you got access to it, it is perfect for this kind of work.

http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Sed.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sed

Thanks for all the replies.
I managed to do it with dreamweaver search and replace.
I did come across a dreamweaver plugin that might be useful for others with a similar problem -
http://divahtml.com/products/divaFr...eaver_tools.php
Thanks.