Find & Replace
Find exact text and replace every occurrence in one pass. Your work stays on this device whenever possible.
How to use Find & Replace
- Paste the source into "Original text".
- Type the target in "Find text" and the substitute in "Replace with"; leave the replacement empty to delete every match.
- Set "Match Scope" to "Replace all occurrences" or "Replace first occurrence only".
- Tick "Match case", "Regular expression" or "Preserve case" as needed; a bad pattern reports "Invalid regular expression".
- Press "Find & Replace" and read the statistics block: replaced count, total matches, original length and new length.
Worked example
Text: "Colour, colour, COLOUR." Find "colour", Replace with "color", Match case off, Preserve case ticked, scope all. The output is "Color, color, COLOR." and the statistics show Replaced 3, Total matches 3, Original length 23 characters, New length 20 characters. Without Preserve case all three become lowercase "color".
When to use this tool
- Switching British spellings to American ones across a long article.
- Deleting a tracking parameter from a list of links by leaving Replace with empty.
- Masking four-digit years with a regex such as \d{4} before sharing a sample.
Important limitations
All replacement operations execute locally in your browser with zero server latency. Extremely large files exceeding 50 MB may experience brief DOM rendering delays when rendering hundreds of thousands of highlight spans.
Frequently asked questions
Does "Whole word only" work?
Not at present. The option builds its pattern from a backspace character instead of a word boundary, so ticking it reports no matches on ordinary text. Leave it unticked, or turn on Regular expression and type \bword\b yourself.
Can I use $1 capture groups in the replacement?
No. The replacement is inserted as literal text, so "$1" or "$&" appear exactly as typed. Regular expressions apply to the search side only and use JavaScript syntax.
What does "Preserve case" change?
An all-caps match longer than one letter gets an uppercase replacement, an all-lowercase match gets a lowercase one, and a capitalised match gets a capitalised one. Other mixed-case matches receive the replacement exactly as typed.
Why do the stats say more matches than replacements?
With first-occurrence scope, "Total matches found" still counts every match in the text while "Replaced" shows 1. The result text is the same either way; only the two counters differ, so compare them to see how many matches remain untouched.
How are special characters and line anchors treated?
Outside regex mode the search text is escaped, so a dot or bracket is matched literally. In regex mode there is no multiline flag, so ^ and $ mean the start and end of the whole text, not of each line.