Find and Replace

Bulk find and replace with regex and case options

Source text

Find

Replace with

Case sensitiveRegex modeWhole word only

Result · Replacements: 0

How it works

Find and Replace — Bulk find and replace with regex and case options. All processing happens in your browser — no upload, no signup, no email required. Free forever.

Last updated: 2026-05-06

Editor's note

The day we wiped half a config file with a careless regex was the day we started thinking about this tool differently. One slightly too-greedy pattern, one click of Replace all, and the whole 'server { ... }' block was gone — replaced by nothing, because the capture group we thought we were preserving did not actually exist. Replace-all without a preview of what you are about to touch is the digital equivalent of sending a 2 a.m. email without reading it back, and we have done both more than once.

So we built this with the assumption that the destructive step needs a moment of friction. The match count appears before you commit, regex special characters are documented in plain language right next to the toggle, and the tip about copying the original somewhere safe is in the Tips block on purpose — because we still do it ourselves before any non-trivial bulk replace. Two clicks instead of one is worth it every single time.

About Find and Replace

Find and Replace performs bulk text substitutions in your browser, with optional case sensitivity, whole-word matching and full regular expression support. Paste a source document, type what to find and what to replace it with, and the tool rewrites the whole string in one click — also showing how many matches were touched.

It is the right tool when your editor's built-in find and replace is too limited or when you simply do not have an editor open. Developers use it for quick refactors of pasted code, content editors use it to scrub product names across long marketing copy, and analysts use it to clean up data exports that arrived with stray characters.

All work runs locally — no upload, no server round-trip, no size cap beyond your machine's memory. Multi-megabyte text files work fine, and confidential snippets like API responses or contracts never leave your computer.

How to use Find and Replace

Paste the document you want to edit into the Source text area.
Type the string you want to locate in the Find box.
Type the replacement string in the Replace with box (leave it blank to delete every match).
Toggle Case sensitive, Whole word only or Regex mode depending on what you need.
Click Replace all — the rewritten text appears in the Result panel along with a count of how many replacements were made.
Copy the result back into your editor, document or codebase.

Common use cases

Renaming a product, brand or feature across hundreds of paragraphs of marketing copy in one pass.
Stripping unwanted whitespace, tabs or non-printing characters from data pasted out of a PDF.
Swapping every camelCase identifier in a code snippet to snake_case using a regex like '([a-z])([A-Z])' replaced with '$1_$2'.
Anonymising a transcript by replacing every occurrence of a person's name with [REDACTED] before sharing it.
Updating relative URLs to absolute URLs in an HTML export by matching 'href="/' and replacing it with 'href="https://example.com/'.

Tips & common mistakes

When Regex mode is on, special characters like '.', '*' and '(' are interpreted, not matched literally — escape them with a backslash if you want the literal character.
Whole word only is invaluable when your search term is a substring of larger words — without it, replacing 'cat' would also touch 'concatenate' and 'category'.
Use $1, $2, $3 in the replacement field to insert the first, second or third regex capture group — exactly like JavaScript's String.replace.
Always copy the original somewhere safe before a destructive bulk replace. The tool does not keep an undo history; the previous source is gone the moment you click Replace all.

Frequently asked questions

Does the replacement support regex backreferences?

Yes when 'Regex mode' is on. Use $1, $2, … to insert captured groups in the replacement string, just like in JavaScript's String.replace.

Can I do a case-preserving replace?

Not yet — we replace literally. Case sensitivity only affects matching. Toggle it off to match all variants and replace them with the same target text.

Is there a hard limit on the source length?

No. Replace runs in your browser, so the limit is your machine's memory. Multi-megabyte files work fine.

Can I do a find without a replace, just to count matches?

Yes — type your search term, leave the replace field set to the same value (or use $0 in regex mode) and click Replace all. The replacement count tells you exactly how many matches were found without changing anything.

What regex flavour is supported?

JavaScript regex. That covers character classes, quantifiers, lookaheads, lookbehinds, named groups and Unicode property escapes. PCRE-only features like recursive patterns are not supported.

Does the tool replace inside HTML or Markdown safely?

It treats your input as plain text — tags and Markdown syntax are matched literally just like any other characters. For structural rewrites of HTML use a parser-based tool, but for renaming a brand or fixing a typo in a body of HTML, this works fine.

Latest from the blog

Regex for Non-Developers: A Practical GuideA friendly, jargon-light regex tutorial for writers, analysts, marketers, and anyone who lives in Find & Replace. Learn the syntax that matters and steal ten ready-to-use recipes.