Find & Replace

Bulk find and replace text — without opening a single program

Search-and-replace is one of those features every text editor has, but nobody wants to install a desktop app just to swap a phone number across a wall of text, fix a typo in a thousand-line CSV, or change every reference to an old brand name in a press release. This online Find & Replace tool gives you the same power as a full editor — plain text, whole-word, case-sensitive, and regular expression modes — right in your browser, with no installation and no upload.

How to use it

Paste or type your source text into the main editor. Enter the word, phrase, or pattern you want to find. Enter the replacement text (leave it empty to simply delete every match). Choose your options — case-sensitive, whole-word only, or regex — and click Replace All. The output appears in place, and a counter shows how many matches were replaced so you can verify the change before copying it back into your document.

Plain text vs. whole-word vs. regex

Plain text mode replaces every literal occurrence of your search string, regardless of whether it sits inside another word. Searching for cat would match the standalone word cat, but also category, concatenate, and education. That is sometimes what you want, but more often it causes accidental replacements.

Whole-word mode only matches your search term when it is bounded by spaces, punctuation, or the start/end of a line. Now cat only matches the animal, not the embedded letters in category. This is the safer option for editing prose.

Regex mode unlocks pattern matching. You can find every email address, every URL, every five-digit number, every line starting with a specific word, or any other structural pattern. A few quick examples:

• \d+ matches one or more digits — useful for stripping or transforming numbers
• \s+ matches any run of whitespace — useful for collapsing or removing extra spaces
• ^\s*$ matches empty lines — useful for stripping blank rows
• https?://\S+ roughly matches any URL

You can also use capture groups and backreferences in the replacement field. (\w+)@(\w+) replaced with $2-$1 would swap the parts of an email-like pattern.

Real-world tasks this solves

Rebranding documents. Your company changes its name. Paste every press release, internal doc, and marketing page in, replace the old name with the new one, and you are done in a few seconds per file — including consistent capitalisation if you toggle case-sensitive.

Cleaning data exports. CSV files often arrive with the wrong delimiter, with quoted fields, or with extra symbols. A few targeted replaces — for example, replacing ; with ,, or removing every " — can fix a broken export in seconds.

Code refactoring. Renaming a variable across a snippet, switching from one logging function to another, or migrating a deprecated API call to its replacement is one Find & Replace away. For large multi-file refactors you would use your IDE, but for one-off snippets in a chat message, blog post, or documentation page, this tool is faster.

Removing unwanted text. Leave the "Replace with" field empty and you can mass-delete a recurring phrase — for example stripping every [citation needed] from a Wikipedia copy, or removing every timestamp from a chat log.

Reformatting lists. Convert a comma-separated list to a newline-separated one by replacing , with \n in regex mode. Reverse that to flatten lines into a single CSV.

Tips and gotchas

Always preview the count before committing the result back into a sensitive document. Regex is powerful but easy to misuse — a greedy pattern can match far more than intended. Start your regex testing on a small sample of text, then apply to the full document once the pattern is correct.

For replacements that need a different value on each line (e.g. inserting an incrementing number), find-and-replace is not the right tool — use a small script or one of our other utilities like Add Prefix & Suffix in combination with Add Line Numbers.

Privacy

All find-and-replace processing happens in your browser using native JavaScript. Your text, your search patterns, and the result never leave your computer. There is no server-side processing, no logging, and no upload step at any point — so the tool is safe for confidential documents, source code, customer data, and anything else you would not want sitting on someone else's server.