Online Find and Replace

Replace one piece of text with another across a whole document in one step. By default the match is literal, so characters like . and * are treated as normal text.

Turn on regular expressions for pattern matching, and use $1, $2 in the replacement to reuse parts of the match.

Key features

• Literal or regular expression matching
• Case sensitive or insensitive
• Replace the first match or all matches
• Capture groups with $1, $2 and $& in regex mode

Regex example

Find:    (\w+) (\w+)
Replace: $2 $1

John Smith  ->  Smith John

How to use

1. Paste your text.
2. Enter what to find and what to replace it with.
3. Copy the result. The note shows how many replacements were made.

Use cases

• Renaming a word across a long document
• Reformatting names or dates with capture groups
• Cleaning up exports and logs

In depth

Literal replacement scans the text for an exact sequence of characters and swaps each occurrence, so searching for 1.5 matches only those three characters. Regular expressions describe patterns instead. A dot matches any character, a star means zero or more of the previous item, and a backslash followed by d matches a digit. Parentheses create capture groups, which the replacement can reference as $1, $2 and so on. Swapping a name format, for example, finds two words in groups and writes them back in reverse order, which is impossible with plain search.

Regex mode brings pitfalls. Quantifiers are greedy by default, so a pattern like a.*b matches from the first a to the last b on the line, while a.*?b stops at the first b. Special characters such as the dot, plus, brackets and parentheses must be escaped with a backslash when you want them literally. Case insensitive matching changes only matching, not the replacement text. Always check the replacement count, and consider testing the pattern on a short sample first. Poorly written patterns with nested quantifiers can run very slowly on large inputs.

Tips

• Switch off regular expressions when searching for text containing dots, brackets or dollar signs. Literal mode avoids having to escape special characters and prevents accidental matches.
• Test regex replacements on a few lines before pasting a large document. Check the count shown, and keep the original text so that you can run the replacement again with a corrected pattern.
• Use word boundaries, written as backslash b, to avoid replacing parts of longer words. Replacing cat without them would also change concatenate and catalog.

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