What's the difference between plain and regex?

Plain text mode does literal string matching — typing 'cat' finds the three characters c-a-t wherever they appear. Regex mode interprets your search as a pattern, where /\d+/ matches any sequence of digits regardless of which digits they are. Regex lets you describe shapes (phone numbers, email addresses, dates) rather than specific text, but it has a real learning curve. For most simple find-replace work, plain text is the right tool; regex earns its keep when you need pattern flexibility.

Wrap your pattern in /forward-slashes/flags or toggle the regex option in the UI. The character classes you'll use most are \d for digits, \w for word characters, and \s for whitespace. The dot matches any character, * means zero or more, + means one or more, and ? makes the previous element optional. Anchors ^ and $ pin matches to the start and end of strings or lines. Square brackets like [abc] match any one character from the set. Always test a regex on a sample before unleashing it on real data.

What are capture groups?

Capture groups are parenthesized parts of a regex pattern that you can reference in the replacement string. A pattern like /(\w+)@(\w+)/ has two groups — everything before the @ and everything after. In the replacement you reference them with $1 and $2, so a replacement of '$2/$1' swaps the email parts and turns user@domain into domain/user. The mechanism is what lets regex go from a search tool to a transformation tool.

Can I find multiline patterns?

Yes, with the /m flag. By default regex matches stay within a single line, with ^ and $ anchored to the start and end of the entire input. The multiline flag lets ^ match the start of any line and $ match the end, which is what you want for log analysis or multi-paragraph patterns. Some tools surface this as an explicit checkbox rather than a flag, but the underlying behavior is the same.

How do I avoid breaking my data?

Always preview before committing the replace. The tool should show you a match count and sample matches so you can sanity-check before pulling the trigger. For complex patterns, replace the first instance manually and verify it produced what you expected before doing replace-all. And keep a backup of the original — text edits don't have a clean undo once you've copied the result somewhere else.

What if my replacement has special characters?

Escape special characters in the replacement when they need to appear literally: \$ for a dollar sign, double-backslash for a literal backslash. In regex search patterns, escape regex metacharacters — \. to match a literal period instead of any character, \+ for a literal plus, and so on. Some implementations auto-escape, but it's worth verifying with a quick test rather than assuming.

Is the data sent to a server?

No. Find-replace runs as pure JavaScript text manipulation in your browser, which means your text never leaves the page. That's important for confidential documents, sensitive code snippets, and personal data — there's no upload to inspect or worry about.

Find and Replace

Find and replace text online with regex support and case-sensitive matching. Free search and replace tool for bulk text editing.

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About Find and Replace

Find and replace text with support for regular expressions. Use regex for powerful pattern matching.

How to Use Find and Replace

Paste your text

Drop your content into the input box — long documents, code snippets pulled from a Slack thread, scraped data, exported text, anything that came in as plain text. The tool works the same way regardless of source, and there's no size limit beyond your browser's memory.

Configure find pattern

Type the literal text you want to find, or toggle the regex switch for pattern matching when you need shape-based searches. The auxiliary toggles cover case sensitivity, whole-word boundaries (so a search for 'cat' won't match inside 'category'), and the standard regex flags like /m for multiline mode and /g for global matching.

Set replacement

Type the replacement text. With regex enabled, you can reference capture groups using $1, $2, and so on — a pattern like /(\w+)@(\w+)/ with replacement '$2/$1' swaps the parts of an email and turns user@domain into domain/user. Special characters in the replacement string need escaping when they should appear literally.

Preview and replace

The match count and preview pane let you sanity-check before pulling the trigger. If you expected forty matches and see zero, your search pattern is wrong; if you expected forty and see four hundred, your pattern is too greedy. You can replace one match at a time or run replace-all once you're confident, then copy the result somewhere safe before doing anything else with the document.

When to Use Find and Replace

Bulk text editing

Renaming a brand across a long document, swapping out terminology that changed mid-project, or fixing the same typo someone repeated forty times — all of these turn into a thirty-second job once you have a tool with regex support. Writers, editors, and content folks reach for it constantly because the alternative is manual editing or reading through a document until your eyes glaze over.

Code refactoring

Modern IDEs have find-replace built in, but sometimes you've copied a snippet out of an email or a Slack message and want to clean it up before pasting it into a project. The web tool handles that case well, plus it gives you a quick preview pane for testing regex patterns before you trust them on real code. It's a useful complement to your editor rather than a replacement.

Data cleaning

Pre-processing scraped CSVs and database exports usually means a few standard transformations — replacing 'NULL' with an empty cell, normalizing phone numbers to a single format, stripping non-printing characters that crept in from somewhere. Doing this in a real text editor is fiddly; doing it in a regex-aware tool that previews matches takes seconds.

Email/document templating

Mail merge and personalized communications often boil down to swapping placeholders like {{name}} or {{date}} for real values. When you need to do it once for a single recipient (not a whole list), find-replace beats setting up a templating engine. Sales reps, recruiters, and anyone preparing one-off personalized documents tend to use it this way.

Find and Replace Examples

Simple replace

Input

Find: 'old company name'. Replace: 'NewCo'

Output

Every instance of 'old company name' becomes 'NewCo' across the document, with a count showing 47 replacements were made.

The basic case. The match count up front tells you whether you searched for the right thing — zero matches means a typo in the search term, a wildly high count means your pattern was too broad. Useful for rebrands, terminology changes, and global typo fixes.

Regex pattern

Input

Find: /\b\d{3}-\d{4}\b/, Replace: 'XXX-XXXX'

Output

Phone numbers in the 555-1234 format get redacted to XXX-XXXX, leaving the rest of the text untouched.

Once you reach for regex, you can match shape rather than literal text. Three digits, a dash, four more digits, with word boundaries on both sides — that's a phone number, regardless of which specific number it is. Common for anonymizing logs or sanitizing data before sharing it.

Capture groups

Input

Find: /(\w+)@(\w+)/, Replace: '$2/$1' (swap parts)

Output

An email like user@example becomes example/user, with the local part and domain swapped.

Capture groups let you keep parts of the match and rearrange them in the replacement. $1 references the first parenthesized group, $2 the second, and so on. It's the difference between regex as a search tool and regex as a transformation tool.

Tips & Best Practices for Find and Replace

1.Run a small test first when the pattern is non-trivial. A regex that's slightly wrong can turn a thousand-line document into garbage in one click, and there's no undo on raw text once you've copied it back somewhere.
2.Use the match count or preview pane before committing. If you expected forty matches and you see zero, your search is wrong. If you expected forty and see four hundred, your pattern is too greedy. Either way, finding out before the replace saves you a recovery job.
3.Watch your case sensitivity. 'CEO', 'ceo', and 'Ceo' are three different things to a case-sensitive search. Plain text mode is usually insensitive by default, regex usually requires the /i flag — verify which mode you're in.
4.Use word boundaries for whole-word matches. Searching for 'cat' will happily replace it inside 'category' or 'concatenate' unless you wrap it in regex word boundaries — /\bcat\b/ — which most regex engines support.
5.Keep a backup of important content before bulk replacements. Especially for legal documents, production code, and anything that took real work to produce. Most disasters happen during a 'quick' replace that turned out not to be quick.
6.Learn the regex character classes. Even a small handful — \d for digits, \w for word characters, \s for whitespace — multiplies what you can do. The investment pays back the first week you spend doing serious text processing.

Frequently Asked Questions

It searches for text in pasted content or uploaded files and replaces matches with whatever you specify. The matching can be plain literal text or full regular expressions, with options for case sensitivity, whole-word boundaries, and the standard regex flags. Common uses include bulk editing across long documents, cleaning up data exported from messy sources, refactoring small code snippets, and templating where placeholders need to be replaced with real values.

Find and Replace

About Find and Replace

How to Use Find and Replace

Paste your text

Configure find pattern

Set replacement

Preview and replace

When to Use Find and Replace

Bulk text editing

Code refactoring

Data cleaning

Email/document templating

Find and Replace Examples

Simple replace

Regex pattern

Capture groups

Tips & Best Practices for Find and Replace

Frequently Asked Questions

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