What is the Find and Replace tool?

It searches your text for a specific string (or regex pattern) and replaces it with another string. You can replace all occurrences at once, use case-insensitive matching, and use regular expressions for advanced pattern matching.

How do I use regex in the Find field?

Enable the "Use regex" toggle, then enter a valid JavaScript regular expression pattern in the Find field. For example, \d+ matches one or more digits, \b\w+\b matches whole words, and [aeiou] matches any vowel.

Can I use regex capture groups in the replacement?

Yes. In regex mode, use $1, $2, etc. to reference capture groups in the Replace field. For example, find (\w+) (\w+) and replace with $2 $1 to swap two words.

What does the "Replace all" toggle do?

"Replace all" (on by default) replaces every occurrence. When turned off, only the first match is replaced.

Is my text stored anywhere?

No. All find/replace operations happen in your browser. Your text never leaves your device.

What is the character limit?

No limit. Find and replace works on text of any length - including very large documents.

Find and Replace

Find and replace text online with optional regex support. Free browser-based text search and replace tool - no signup.

🔒 Your text stays in your browser - nothing is sent to our servers

Find

Replace with

Use regex Case sensitive Replace all

Input Text

0Characters

0No spaces

0Words

0Sentences

0Lines

< 1 minRead time

Result

How to Use

Three steps to get started

Paste your text

Paste the text you want to search and replace within.

Enter find & replace

Type what to find and what to replace it with. Enable regex for patterns.

Copy the result

The match count and result update live. Click Copy when done.

About This Tool

Browser-based find & replace with regex support

Find and replace is a text operation that locates every occurrence of a search string - or every substring matching a regular expression - and substitutes it with replacement text. It is the same primitive behind sed -i, VS Code's Ctrl+H panel, and Word's replace dialog, minus the install and the file. Paste, transform, copy.

Literal mode treats your search string as plain characters, soa.b matches only the three-character sequence a.b. This is what you want the majority of the time and it removes the risk of a stray metacharacter silently changing the match set.

Regex mode compiles the Find field as a JavaScript regular expression (the same engine your browser runs), which unlocks pattern classes, quantifiers, anchors, alternation, lookahead and lookbehind, and capture-group references in the replacement. A few patterns that solve common cleanup jobs:

\s+ → a single space - collapse runs of whitespace from a bad paste
^\d+\.\s* → empty - strip leading list numbering (needs multiline-aware input)
(\w+)@(\w+\.com) → $1 [at] $2 - obfuscate email addresses using capture groups
(\d{4})-(\d{2})-(\d{2}) → $3/$2/$1 - reorder ISO dates to day/month/year
[^\x00-\x7F] → empty - drop every non-ASCII character before a legacy import

Gotchas worth knowing

Regex is greedy by default. <.+> against<b>hi</b> swallows the entire string, because +takes as much as it can and backtracks only as needed. Add ? to make it lazy:<.+?>. Dollar signs are special in the replacement field.$1 means "first capture group" and $& means "the whole match", so to insert a literal dollar sign you must write $$.Escape your metacharacters. In regex mode, .,*, +, ?, (, [,{, ^, $, | and \ all carry meaning - a plain . matches any character, which is why replacing "3.5" can also rewrite "3x5".

The controls are deliberately small: case-sensitive or case-insensitive matching, replace every occurrence or only the first, and a live match count that updates as you type so you can validate a pattern before trusting the output. Because everything is computed in the page there is no upload step and no size ceiling - you can run a regex over a whole exported CSV, a log dump, or a manuscript, and confidential text never touches a server.

FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

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