Free Find and Replace Tool – Search & Replace Text Online

What Find and Replace Does and How Matching Modes Work

Find and replace swaps every occurrence of one string for another in a single pass. Changing a company name that appears 214 times in a document is one operation here instead of 214 edits, and unlike doing it by hand you cannot miss one on page nine. Writers use it to correct a misspelled name throughout a manuscript. Data workers strip stray tabs and normalise separators in exported files. Developers rename a variable or update a repeated string without opening an editor. Four things make it safe rather than reckless: a live match count, case sensitivity, whole-word matching, and undo history. Three matching modes cover most needs. Plain mode looks for your exact string anywhere it appears, including inside longer words — searching for cat also hits catalogue. Whole word mode wraps the search in word boundaries so only standalone occurrences match, which is what you want when renaming a term. Regex mode treats your search as a regular expression, giving you character classes, quantifiers, anchors and capture groups. Case sensitivity is a separate toggle that applies to all three: with it off, Cat and cat are the same match. The match count updates while you type the search term, so you always know the scope before committing. Undo keeps a history of each replacement so you can step back if a pattern went further than intended. A worked example. Take a 1,200-word article that mentions Acme Corp 14 times, three of those as acme corp in lower case. Type Acme Corp with case sensitivity on and the counter reads 11. Turn case sensitivity off and it reads 14. Now the regex case: you want to reformat dates written as 2026-03-14 into 14/03/2026. Search for the pattern with three capture groups for year, month and day separated by hyphens, then use a replacement referring to group 3, group 2 and group 1 in that order. Every ISO date in the file flips to day-first format in one pass, and the match count told you beforehand that there were nine of them. Specific situations. A novelist changes a character's surname from Mehta to Malhotra across an 80,000-word manuscript. An analyst cleaning a CSV export replaces every double tab with a single comma so the file parses correctly. A developer renames an API field from user_id to customer_id across a config file, using whole-word mode so user_identifier is left alone. A translator swaps a product name to its localised form in 60 subtitle lines. A teacher preparing a worksheet blanks out an answer term by replacing it with a row of underscores everywhere it appears. A support lead scrubbing a log before sharing it in a bug report replaces every customer email with a placeholder, using a regex pattern for the address format rather than hunting for them one at a time. An SEO editor swaps an old product name for the rebranded one across 40 meta descriptions pasted into one block. Run a plain replace first and read the match count before you touch Replace All; if the number surprises you, your search string is wrong. That habit prevents nearly every bad outcome. Regex is where beginners get burned — a pattern missing an anchor or using a greedy quantifier will match far more than you expected, and an unescaped dot matches any character rather than a literal full stop. Whole-word mode is the fix for the most common version of this problem, where replacing a short word wrecks every longer word containing it. Keep the undo history in mind as your safety net: revert, refine the pattern, try again. Everything is processed in your browser, so large or confidential documents are never uploaded, stored or logged.

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