Find and Replace Text

Find and replace is the operation of locating every occurrence of a piece of text and swapping it for another. It is the single most common text edit there is, built into every editor and word processor, and this tool does it in the browser on a block of text you paste, without an account and without sending the text anywhere. You type what to find, type what to replace it with, and get the result back with a count of how many changes were made.

What separates this from a regular-expression replacer is that the search is literal. Every character you type in the find box is matched exactly as itself, so a full stop matches a full stop and nothing else, a dollar sign matches a dollar sign, and a bracket or a backslash needs no escaping. That is the behaviour most people want: they are cleaning up pasted text, fixing a misspelling that appears fifty times, or standardising a term, not writing a pattern. A regex replacer treats those same characters as commands, which is why a stray dot or asterisk in the search term can silently match far more than intended.

Two controls handle the cases where a plain swap is too blunt. Case sensitivity decides whether Cat, CAT, and cat are the same word or three different ones, which matters when you want to fix a name without touching an unrelated word that happens to share its letters. Whole-word matching decides whether the search term must stand on its own rather than sit inside a longer word, so replacing cat leaves category and scattered untouched. You can also apply several find-and-replace rules in one pass: each rule runs in turn on the result of the one before it, which is how you rename a set of terms, normalise inconsistent spellings, or strip out several unwanted strings in a single click.

Here is a worked example of find and replace in text using the Load Sample button. The sample mentions cat in several forms. Find cat and replace it with dog with both boxes unticked and the result reports 7 replacements, because CAT, category and cats all match. Tick Whole word only and it drops to 5, since category and cats are skipped. Tick Case sensitive as well and it is 4, because CAT no longer counts. Checking that number before you copy is the quickest way to find text and replace it without surprises.

Everything happens on your device. The text is processed in JavaScript in your browser and is never uploaded, logged, or stored, so notes, drafts, transcripts, and anything else you paste stay private. Because there is no server involved, the replacement is instant even on a large block of text, and the tool keeps working with the network disconnected once the page has loaded.