🔍 Find & Replace

How to Use Find & Replace

Enter your source text in the main text area. Type the term you want to search for in the "Find" field and the replacement in the "Replace with" field. The tool replaces all occurrences instantly and shows a count of replacements made. Click "Copy Result" to copy the modified text.

Plain Text vs Regex Mode

By default, the tool runs in plain text mode: every character in your search term is matched literally. Special characters like ., *, +, (, ), and [ are all treated as regular characters.

Enable Regex Mode to unlock pattern-based matching using JavaScript regular expression syntax. Regex allows you to match not just specific text, but patterns like "any digit", "any whitespace", "start of line", or "word boundary". This is one of the most powerful text manipulation techniques available.

Useful Regex Patterns

• \d+ — Matches one or more consecutive digits (0-9). Use to find or remove all numbers in a document.
• \s+ — Matches one or more whitespace characters (spaces, tabs, newlines). Replace with a single space to collapse multiple spaces.
• \n — Matches a newline character. Replace with a space or comma to join lines into a single line.
• \t — Matches a tab character. Replace with spaces or commas to convert tab-separated values.
• ^ — Matches the start of each line (in multiline mode). Use to add a prefix to every line.
• $ — Matches the end of each line. Use to add a suffix to every line.
• [aeiou] — Matches any vowel. Replace with empty string to remove all vowels.
• <[^>]+> — Matches HTML tags. Replace with empty string to strip HTML from text.
• \b(\w+)\s+\1\b — Matches repeated consecutive words (like "the the"). Replace with $1 to fix the duplicate.

Practical Use Cases

• Brand/product name changes: After a rebranding, replace every occurrence of an old product name across a large document in one step. Enable case-insensitive mode to catch all capitalization variants.
• Data format conversion: Convert date formats (e.g., MM/DD/YYYY to YYYY-MM-DD), phone number formats, or currency symbols throughout structured data exports using regex replacement.
• Code refactoring outside an IDE: Rename variables, function names, or CSS class names across a code snippet. This is useful when you want to clean up code before pasting into a PR description or documentation.
• Content standardization: Fix consistent spelling variants (“colour” → “color”), standardize terminology, or replace informal contractions (“don’t” → “do not”) for formal documents.
• Removing unwanted content: Strip all HTML tags, remove all numbers, delete all punctuation, or remove a specific word from a document by leaving the Replace field empty.
• CSV and data manipulation: Change delimiters (comma to tab, tab to pipe), add quotation marks around values, or clean up improperly formatted exported data.
• Markdown cleanup: Remove Markdown formatting symbols, convert Markdown headings to plain text, or reformat code fences for a different documentation system.

Tips for Better Replacements

• In regex mode, special characters like ., *, +, (, ), [, ], {, }, ^, $, |, and \ must be escaped with a backslash (\., \*, etc.) if you want to match them literally.
• Use capture groups ((pattern)) and backreferences ($1, $2) in your replacement string to rearrange matched content. For example, to swap two words: Find = (\w+) (\w+), Replace = $2 $1.
• Test your regex on a small sample first before applying to large documents to ensure it matches what you expect.

Related Tools

• Case Converter — Change text case after your find & replace operations.
• Whitespace Cleaner — Remove extra spaces and normalize whitespace after replacement.
• Duplicate Line Remover — Remove duplicate lines that may appear after batch replacements.
• Word Counter — Count words before and after to verify your replacements worked as expected.