Find and Replace Text
Find and replace text across your content in one go. Enter your text, set find and replace terms, run it, then copy the result.
Enter your Texts
SETTINGS:
RESULT:
What this does
This swaps one piece of text for another throughout your content in a single pass. You give it your text, tell it what to find and what to put in place, and it rewrites every match for you. Instead of hunting through a document changing the same word over and over, you set it once and let the tool do the lot.
How to use it
- Paste your text into the box on the left.
- Type what you want to find in the Find box, and what to swap it for in the Replace box.
- Press Replace, then Copy to take the result, or Clear to reset everything.
It all happens in your browser, so your text stays with you the whole time.
How the replacing works
Two things are worth knowing about how it behaves. First, it replaces every match, not just the first one. Wherever your find term appears in the text, each occurrence is swapped, so a word used a dozen times is updated in all twelve places at once. Second, it pays attention to capital letters, so the match is case-sensitive. Searching for cat will change cat but leave Cat untouched, so if you want both you would run it for each. Also note that both boxes need a value to run, so it is built for swapping one thing for another rather than deleting text by replacing it with nothing.
The find box understands patterns
Here is the detail that is both powerful and worth a little care. The Find box does not just take plain words, it understands regular expressions, which are a compact language for describing patterns in text. For everyday finds this makes no difference at all, since ordinary words and letters behave exactly as you would expect.
It matters when your find term contains special symbols. Characters like ., *, ?, (, ), and [ have a special meaning in that pattern language rather than standing for themselves. So a search for . will match any character, not just a full stop. If you want to find one of those symbols literally, put a backslash in front of it, as in \. for a real full stop. The flip side is that if you know a little of the pattern language, you can do clever finds, like matching any digit, that a plain search could never manage.
When it saves the day
Find and replace earns its keep whenever the same change needs making again and again. Renaming a term, a product, or a person throughout a long piece is the classic case. Fixing a typo that you have repeated all the way through is another. Updating a name, a link, or a placeholder everywhere it appears, or standardising a word that has been written several different ways, all come down to one find and one replace. What would be a slow, easy-to-miss job by hand becomes a single click.
Questions people ask
Does it replace every occurrence or just the first?
Every one. The tool runs through the whole text and swaps each match it finds, so all occurrences are updated together.
Is the find case-sensitive?
Yes. It matches capitalisation exactly, so a lowercase search will not catch a capitalised version. Run it once for each form if you need both.
Why did searching for a symbol behave oddly?
Because the Find box reads patterns, and some symbols have a special meaning there. To match a symbol literally, put a backslash before it, such as \. for a full stop.
Can I delete a word by replacing it with nothing?
Not directly, since both boxes must have a value to run. It is designed to swap one thing for another rather than to remove text outright.
References
- MDN Web Docs. Regular expressions. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Guide/Regular_expressions
Sarayu is an Assistant Lecturer at Herald College, currently studying Masters of Engineering at KU. She is a Software engineer and educator who enjoys writing, and publishes essays and articles. She helps to review word/text utilities for clarity and usability.