@Bill.French makes some great points, as always. After reading this thread the other day, I spent a little time and wrote a script that does this global search-and-replace. It works pretty well, but after something that I noticed in testing combined with Bill’s comments, I’m not certain about releasing it.
What I noticed was that while the global change was successful, trying to undo that change was not. Long story short, a manual undo only affected one field in one record across the two tables where the change was made by the script, and it didn’t always undo the change actually made by the script. In my latest test, it treated the post-replace text as something that I’d manually typed, and the undo operations removed that text and never showed what was in the field pre-replace.
I can see a more robust tool (i.e. a custom extension) that includes its own internal undo queue as one way to possibly mitigate the potential risk of such an effort, but would that be enough to make it “safe”? I’m not sure.
