Find and Replace Text

What this tool does

Find and replace swaps every occurrence of one string for another. This page does that as plain text. It does not compile a regular expression. A period in the find box is a period, not “any character.” Comparison is case-sensitive unless you turn that off. The original paste stays in the first box. The result is written to the second. Nothing is uploaded.

That is a different job from cleanup. Collapsing every run of spaces, or normalizing Windows line breaks, is the Whitespace Cleaner. Using find-and-replace to delete “ ” into “ ” works for one pattern and misses tabs. Use the cleaner when the job is “normalize,” and this page when the job is “this phrase becomes that phrase.”

How to use

1. Paste the text.
2. Enter the exact find string. Enter the replacement, which may be empty if you want deletions.
3. Leave case-sensitive on unless Cat and cat should both match. Replace all. Copy writes the result.

Empty find is an error. Empty text is an error. Empty replace is allowed and means “delete these matches.” The status reports how many occurrences were replaced. Example uses “The cat sat on the Cat mat.” with find cat and replace dog.

Example

With case-sensitive on, only the lowercase cat is replaced: The dog sat on the Cat mat. One replacement. Turn case-sensitive off and both matches change: The dog sat on the dog mat. Two replacements. The replacement keeps the casing you typed in the replace field. It does not “smart-case” to Cat.

Find: cat
Replace: dog
Case-sensitive: The dog sat on the Cat mat.

Limits

• No regular expressions. That is deliberate. Unsafe or surprising patterns are how these tools usually go wrong. If you need a regex, use an editor you already trust.
• Replacement is literal. $1 is the two characters dollar and one, not a capture.
• Overlapping matches are not re-scanned inside a replacement. The search continues after the matched span.
• Line breaks can be part of the text but not easily typed into the single-line find field. This page is for phrases, not paragraph surgery.
• Input over 200,000 characters is refused.

Pasted HTML is text. Replacing script with plain changes letters. It does not run a tag. Quotes and Unicode in the find or replace boxes are ordinary characters.

If the only problem was extra blank lines or mixed spaces, skip this page and use the Whitespace Cleaner. If you needed unique lines after a replace, the Remove Duplicate Lines tool is the next step.

The replacement runs in this browser. A large paste plus a one-character find can produce many replacements; the status count is the check. If the count is zero, the find string is not in the text under the current case rule. Look at spaces and punctuation before you assume the tool failed.

Replace-all is the only mode. There is no “replace next” stepper. If you need to change the first match and leave the rest, do that in an editor with a caret. This page is for the whole-block job: every “colour” becomes “color,” or every leftover environment name is deleted.