Find and Replace
Find exact text and replace it throughout your input.
Written by Anil Gautam · Updated
How does find and replace match text?
Matching is exact and literal. The tool looks for the precise characters in the Find box and swaps every occurrence, working from left to right, for whatever is in Replace with. Symbols carry no special meaning, so a full stop, an asterisk or a dollar sign matches only itself, and prices or file names such as report.pdf are safe to search for. An empty Find box leaves the text unchanged, and the output updates as you type.
Matches inside longer words are replaced too. With the input "The cat sat on the concatenated mat." and cat replaced by dog, the output reads "The dog sat on the condogenated mat." To change only the standalone word, type a space on each side of it in both boxes, then fix any copy at the very start or end of the text, or next to punctuation, by hand. Overlapping matches resolve from the left: replacing aa with b turns aaaa into bb and aaa into ba.
How do I replace a word when its capitalization varies?
Capital letters count, so Apples, apples and APPLES are three different searches. In "Apples, apples and more apples." a search for apples with pears as the replacement gives "Apples, pears and more pears." and the first word keeps its capital A. Run one pass per spelling, copying the output and pasting it back into the input between passes.
For a case-insensitive or whole-word replacement in one step, use the Regex Tester. Its i flag ignores case, a pattern such as \bcat\b matches cat only as a whole word, and the replaced output has its own Copy button. Case Converter is another route when the whole text can be lowercase, because a single lowercase search then catches every variant.
Can I swap two words or make several replacements?
Each pass handles one pair, so a swap needs a placeholder that appears nowhere else in the text. Without one, the second pass also catches the words the first pass just inserted. For "The cat chased the dog.", replace cat with @@ to get "The @@ chased the dog.", then replace dog with cat, then @@ with dog. The result is "The dog chased the cat."
Leaving Replace with empty deletes every match, which is a quick way to strip a repeated prefix or tag. Dollar signs in the replacement go in exactly as typed, so a new price like $6.49 is inserted unchanged. The Find box is a single-line field and cannot hold a line break; to join lines, use Line Break Remover or Whitespace Remover. A result from Compare Lists can be sent here through its Send to menu, and all replacing happens in your browser.