Find and replace is the fastest way to apply a consistent change across a body of text — renaming a term throughout a document, fixing a repeated typo, or reformatting an exported list. With regular expressions enabled it also handles patterns rather than fixed strings.
How to use the Find & Replace
- Paste your text into the input box
- Enter what to find and what to replace it with
- Enable case-sensitive or regex mode if you need them
- Replace, then copy the result
Case sensitivity, and the trap in it
A case-sensitive replace of color with colour leaves Color at the start of sentences untouched. A case-insensitive one catches it, but replaces it with lowercase colour, breaking the sentence.
For terms that appear both mid-sentence and capitalised, run two case-sensitive passes — one for each form — rather than a single case-insensitive one.
Using regular expressions
Regex mode matches patterns instead of literal text. A few that come up constantly:
\s+$— trailing whitespace at the end of lines.\n{3,}— runs of three or more blank lines, for collapsing to two.\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2}— ISO dates.\((\d{3})\)\s*(\d{3})-(\d{4})— US phone numbers, with capture groups you can reorder as$1$2$3.
Capture groups in the search pattern are referenced in the replacement as $1, $2 and so on, which is how you reformat rather than merely substitute.
Frequently asked questions
Can I undo a replacement?
Not within the tool — always keep the original text until you have checked the output. Replacing an empty search string, or an over-broad regex, can change far more than intended.
How do I delete text rather than replace it?
Leave the replacement field empty. Every match is removed.
Why is my regex not matching?
The most common causes are unescaped special characters — . * + ? ( ) [ ] { } | ^ $ \ all have meaning in regex and need a backslash to match literally. Test the pattern in the Regex Tester first.
Can I replace across line breaks?
Yes, in regex mode — use \n to match a newline. In plain text mode the search string is matched literally, including any line breaks you paste into it.