Find & Replace

This free online find and replace tool swaps text across a whole document at once. Type what to find and what to replace it with, and the result updates live with a match count. Switch on regex for pattern matching and capture groups, ignore case, or limit matches to whole words. Everything runs in your browser with no upload.

How to use

1. Enter your Find and Replace-with terms.
2. Paste your text into the Text box (or click Sample to try it).
3. Toggle Regex, Ignore case, or Whole word as needed.
4. Copy the result — every match is already replaced.

Capture groups: rearranging instead of just swapping

Plain find and replace substitutes one fixed string for another. Regex with capture groups lets you keep parts of what you matched and put them back in a different order. Wrap a portion of the pattern in parentheses and reference it in the replacement as $1, numbered by the order the opening brackets appear.

Searching for (\w+)@(\w+) and replacing with $2 at $1 flips both halves of every address in one pass. Use $& for the whole match, and $$ when you need a literal dollar sign — a bare $ before a digit is always read as a group reference, which is a common cause of mangled currency output.

Why a replacement damages words you didn't mean to touch

Because a plain search matches anywhere, including inside longer words. Replacing cat with dog also rewrites “category” and “concatenate”. Whole word requires a word boundary on each side and fixes this without needing regex at all — it is the option to reach for whenever you are replacing a short term.

Two related habits worth adopting: check the live match count before copying the result, since an unexpected number means the pattern is catching more or less than you intended, and keep the original text somewhere until you have confirmed the output, because there is no undo once you have pasted over the source.

Stripping invisible characters

One of the most useful jobs here is removing characters you cannot see — the non-breaking spaces and zero-width spaces that arrive with text copied from web pages and PDFs, and which quietly break sorting, deduplication, and comparison. Paste the offending character into the Find field and leave Replace empty. If you need to identify which character it is first, the Unicode converter will name it by code point.

Common uses

Bulk-editing code or configuration, cleaning exported data, renaming a term consistently across an article, reformatting lists, masking email addresses before sharing a log, and restructuring text with capture groups. For line-level cleanup afterwards, pair it with remove empty lines and remove duplicate lines.