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Find & Replace

Find and replace in any text

Search text with plain words or regular expressions, preview every replacement and apply them all at once.

How to use Find & Replace

  1. Paste text into the Text box, drop a text file onto it, or use Open file. Try an example loads sample text with two regex rules.
  2. Type what to look for in Find and the new text in Replace with. Matches are highlighted under Matches; step through them with the previous and next arrows.
  3. Set the Options: Regular expression, Case sensitive, Whole word, Multiline (^ and $ per line), and Replace all or Replace first.
  4. Click + Add rule to chain more find/replace pairs. They run top to bottom, and each rule’s On box switches it off without deleting it.
  5. Copy or download the Result, send it to another tool with Send to…, or click Use result as the new text to keep editing it.

How it works

Every rule becomes a JavaScript regular expression. In plain-text mode your search is escaped so that characters like . or ( match literally, and the replacement is literal too, so $ is just a dollar sign. With Regular expression on, the pattern uses the browser’s own RegExp syntax, and the replacement understands $1,

lt;name> for named groups,
amp; for the whole match and $ for a dollar sign. Matching is case-insensitive unless Case sensitive is on, and Multiline makes ^ and $ match at each line.

Whole word wraps the pattern so it only matches when no letter, digit or underscore touches it on either side. In plain-text mode that check covers Unicode letters, so it works for words like café; in regex mode it uses \w, which only knows ASCII letters.

Rules are applied in order, each to the result of the ones above it, and each shows its match count. The work runs in a background worker a moment after you stop typing. If it takes more than 1 second, usually because a pattern backtracks catastrophically, the worker is stopped and you are told to simplify the pattern.

Limits

  • At most 5,000 matches per rule are highlighted and counted; replacing still covers every match.
  • Only the first 200,000 characters of the text are highlighted on screen; replacing uses all of it.
  • Matching that takes longer than 1 second is stopped, and no result is produced for that input.
  • Regex mode has no s (dotAll) or u (Unicode) flag, so . doesn’t match line breaks and \p{…} property escapes aren’t available.
  • The options apply to every rule; you can’t mix plain-text and regex rules.
  • Dropped or opened files are limited to 10 MB and must be text.

Privacy

Searching and replacing happen entirely in your browser, in a background worker; your text is never uploaded or stored. The Share button copies a link with your text, rules and options in its # fragment, which browsers don’t send to servers, but anyone you give the link to can read it. Send to… passes text between tools through this tab’s session storage, and it is removed as soon as the receiving tool reads it.

Frequently asked questions

How do I reuse part of the match in the replacement?

Turn on Regular expression, put the part in a capture group and refer to it as $1, $2 and so on, or name it with (?<name>…) and use

lt;name>. For example, (\d{4})-(\d{2})-(\d{2}) with $3/$2/$1 turns 2026-09-14 into 14/09/2026.

Why doesn’t $1 work in my replacement?

In plain-text mode the replacement is inserted exactly as typed, so $1 stays $1. Turn on Regular expression to use group references.

What happens when I add more than one rule?

Rules run in order and each one works on the output of the rules above it, so a later rule can match text an earlier rule inserted. The highlights show the rule you last clicked into.

Why was my search stopped?

Some patterns, such as nested repeats like (a+)+, can take exponentially long on certain text. Matching runs in a worker that is stopped after 1 second so the page doesn’t freeze; simplify the pattern and try again.

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