Find and replace

Search your text and replace every match at once, with case, whole-word and regex options.

Your text

Find

Replace with

Case sensitive Whole words only Regular expression

Matches found

–

The count updates live as you type.

Result

Everything happens in your browser. Nothing you paste is uploaded or stored.

Fix every occurrence in one click

Renaming a product across a page of copy, correcting a misspelt surname in a long document, swapping straight quotes for curly ones: these are jobs where editing by hand is slow and, worse, unreliable, because you will miss one. Find and replace changes every occurrence in a single pass, and the live match count tells you exactly how many changes you are about to make before you commit to them.

Paste your text, type what to find, type what to replace it with (leave it empty to delete the matches entirely), and press Replace all. The original stays untouched in the top box, so you can compare the two, adjust and run it again. Everything happens in your browser; nothing you paste is uploaded or stored anywhere.

Case, whole words and regex

The three checkboxes cover the situations where a naive search goes wrong. Case sensitive makes Hopi and hopi different things, which matters when a word doubles as a name. Whole words only stops your search term matching inside longer words, which is the classic find and replace accident.

You replace cat with dog in a pet-shop description, without whole words on.

Every category becomes dogegory and scattered becomes sdogtered, because both contain the letters cat. With whole words ticked, only the standalone word cat changes and the count drops to the matches you actually meant.

The third option, regular expression, treats the find field as a pattern instead of literal text. In plain mode the tool escapes everything for you, so searching for 3.5 (or a bracket, or a dollar sign) finds exactly those characters and nothing else. In regex mode those characters come alive as pattern syntax, and if the pattern is malformed the error is shown in plain sight rather than silently matching nothing.

Regex mode in practice

Regex earns its keep when the thing you want to change is a shape rather than a fixed string. Digits, dates, reference codes and repeated whitespace all follow patterns, and one pattern replaces what would otherwise be dozens of separate searches. Capture groups go further: wrap part of the pattern in round brackets and use $1, $2 and so on in the replacement to reuse what was matched.

A report is full of UK-style dates like 11/08/2026 that need to become 2026-08-11 for a spreadsheet.

Find (\d{2})/(\d{2})/(\d{4}) with regex on, replace with $3-$2-$1. Every date flips to year-month-day in one pass, and the match count confirms how many dates were found before you run it.

If you want to build up a pattern and inspect each match before using it here, the regex tester lists every match with its position, which makes debugging much quicker.

Habits that prevent bad replacements

Read the match count before you press the button. If you expect roughly twelve changes and the counter says 340, the search is broader than you think, and it is far cheaper to notice that now. Tightening with whole words or case sensitivity usually brings the number back to what you intended.

You want to change the word led to LED in a lighting article.

A plain search shows a suspiciously high count because led sits inside killed, sledge and misled. Whole words only brings it down to the genuine uses, and a quick skim of the result catches the sentence where led really was the past tense of lead.

After a big replacement, run the result through the word counter if you are writing to a limit, or remove extra spaces if your replacement deleted words and left double spaces behind. And when the text you are cleaning has duplicate lines rather than duplicate words, the duplicate line remover is the sharper tool for the job.

Frequently asked questions

Why does the match count show a dash?

A dash means there is nothing to count yet: either the find box is empty, or regex mode is on and the pattern is invalid. Invalid patterns also show an error message under the options explaining what the browser rejected. Fix the pattern or type something to search for and the count returns.

What does the whole words option do?

It only matches your search term where it stands alone as a word, with word boundaries on both sides. Searching for cat with whole words on matches cat but not category or scattered. It works in plain mode and regex mode alike.

What is regex mode?

Regex (regular expressions) is a pattern language, so instead of finding exact text you can find shapes of text, such as any four-digit number or anything inside brackets. Tick the box and the find field is treated as a pattern rather than literal characters. If you are new to regex, the regex tester on this site is a safe place to experiment.

Can I use capture groups like $1 in the replacement?

Yes, in regex mode. Wrap parts of the pattern in round brackets and refer to them as $1, $2 and so on in the replace field, which is how you reorder dates or swap two words around. In plain mode a dollar sign is treated as an ordinary character and inserted literally.

Is my text uploaded anywhere?

No. The searching and replacing run entirely in your browser using JavaScript, and your text never leaves your device.