Find and replace
Find any word, phrase or pattern and replace it instantly. Supports regex and case sensitive matching.
Ctrl + Enter replace all | Ctrl + Shift + C copy output
The history of find and replace
Search-and-replace is nearly as old as interactive computing. It appeared in text editors of the 1960s like QED, where Ken Thompson — later a co-creator of Unix — implemented pattern matching based on "regular expressions", a notation mathematician Stephen Kleene had invented in the 1950s to describe patterns in symbol sequences. Thompson's 1968 work brought regex from theory into everyday editing, and both inventions became universal: every word processor since has shipped some form of Ctrl+H, and the same regex notation now works everywhere from this tool to Google Docs to production databases.
Where batch replacement saves time
The value of find and replace is doing in one action what manual editing does in hundreds. Writers rename a character or product across an entire manuscript. Data workers fix a repeated formatting mistake in an exported file — a wrong separator, an outdated company name, a misspelling copied into every row. Developers clean identifiers in code snippets and config files that live outside their editor. With regex enabled, whole categories of text can be transformed at once: every date reformatted, every phone number masked, every double hyphen turned into a proper dash.
Frequently asked questions
How do I find and replace text online?
Paste your text into the input panel, type the word or phrase to find, type the replacement — or leave it empty to delete matches — and click Replace all. The match counter under the Find field shows how many occurrences exist before you commit, which is a useful sanity check against replacing far more than you expected. The result appears in the output panel, and Ctrl+Enter triggers the replacement from the keyboard when you are iterating quickly.
Does this tool support regular expressions?
Yes. Enable Regex mode and the Find field accepts full regular expression patterns: \d+ matches any run of digits, \s+ any whitespace, [aeiou] any vowel. The Replace field supports backreferences, so captured groups can be reused in the output — find (\w+)\s(\w+) and replace with $2 $1 to swap two words, or wrap every number in brackets by replacing (\d+) with [$1]. It is the same regex flavour JavaScript uses, so patterns from Stack Overflow work as-is.
Can I do a case sensitive find and replace?
Yes. By default matching ignores capitalization — searching "apple" finds "Apple" and "APPLE" too, which suits most prose editing. Enable Case sensitive when capitalization distinguishes meaning: replacing only the standalone brand "Apple" while leaving the fruit alone, or editing code where "userName" and "username" are different identifiers. Combined with whole-word mode, you can make surgical replacements that touch nothing but the exact form you intend.
What does whole word matching do?
It wraps your search term in word boundaries so only complete words match. Searching "cat" with whole word enabled finds "cat" and "cat." but skips "catch", "category" and "concatenate". This is the option that prevents the classic find-and-replace disaster — replacing "man" with "person" and producing "perforpersonce" out of "performance". Enable it whenever your search term is short enough to hide inside longer words.
Can I replace text with nothing to delete it?
Yes — leave the Replace field empty and every match is removed outright. This is the fastest way to strip a recurring word, boilerplate phrase or unwanted symbol from a long document. Paired with regex mode it becomes a cleanup engine: delete everything in parentheses with \([^)]*\), remove all digits with \d, or strip trailing punctuation from every line. Check the match count first so you know exactly how many deletions you are about to make.