Find & Replace

This is a single-string substitution tool: you paste text, name the string to find, give its replacement, and every matching occurrence is swapped at once. It fits the small, repetitive edits that are tedious to do by hand and risky to do in a live document. Developers reach for it to rename a variable, endpoint, or class name across a pasted snippet, or to strip a recurring token before committing. People preparing data use it to normalise a delimiter, blank out a placeholder, or fix a misspelled label that repeats down a column of pasted rows.

In office and business work it handles the everyday cases: updating a product name or address across a block of copy, swapping an old URL for a new one before sending, or enforcing consistent terminology so the same term reads the same way everywhere. Students and admins use it to clean text pulled from a PDF or email — collapsing a repeated artefact, replacing curly characters, or standardising a date or reference format before pasting the result somewhere else.

Because it runs entirely in your browser, on this site the text you paste is not uploaded and nothing persists after the tab closes. That makes it reasonable for drafts, internal notes, and other content you would rather not send to a server just to do a search-and-replace.

The flow is paste, configure, run. Paste or type into the input box, fill the Find and Replace with fields, then press Run or Ctrl/Cmd+Enter. The result appears in a read-only output pane that you can Copy to the clipboard or Download as a .txt file. There is no file upload or drag-and-drop — this tool works on the text in the box, not on documents, spreadsheets, or images.

By default Find is treated as a literal string: special characters such as a dot, dollar sign, or parenthesis match themselves, and the replacement happens on every occurrence. Tick "Use JavaScript regex (global flag)" to switch the Find field to a standard JavaScript regular expression, which lets you match patterns, anchors, and character classes, and use backreferences like $1 in the replacement. Both modes replace all matches across the whole text in one pass.

What it does not do is also worth stating plainly. There is no case-insensitive toggle, no whole-word option, and no live highlight or per-match confirmation — it is replace-all, not step-through. Literal mode is case-sensitive, and an empty Find leaves the text unchanged while an empty Replace simply deletes each match.

The most common surprise is case sensitivity: in literal mode "Color" will not match "color", so mixed-case content needs separate passes or a regex with the i flag added to the pattern. The second is unintended substrings — replacing "art" also rewrites "start" and "chart". Because there is no whole-word setting, scope a literal find by including surrounding spaces or punctuation, or switch to regex and use word boundaries.

Regex mode rewards precision and punishes guesswork. An unescaped metacharacter changes the meaning of your pattern, a greedy quantifier can swallow more than intended, and replacement text behaves specially around the dollar sign, so a literal $ may need care. The tool applies your pattern as written; if the regex is invalid it reports an error rather than guessing. Test on a small sample before running it on the full text.

Two structural limits apply. This is plain-text only — pasting from a formatted document drops styling, and replacing across very large inputs depends on your device's memory since everything runs locally. It also has no undo: once you replace and clear the input, the original is gone unless you kept a copy.

After running, compare the output's line and character counts against the input and skim for places the change should not have reached. Search the output for both the old and the new string: the old one should be absent where you meant it to go, and the new one should not have crept into words you did not intend. If you used regex, confirm that boundaries, capture groups, and any preserved text came through intact, and that no partial matches were left behind.

Pay attention to edge cases the tool handles literally: leading or trailing spaces, repeated runs of the target string, and matches that sit at the very start or end of a line. If something looks off, reset, refine the Find term or pattern, and run again rather than patching the output by hand.

For anything official or financial — contracts, invoices, account numbers, statements, or figures — treat the output as a draft and verify it manually against the source. A blanket replace-all can silently alter a number or reference it should have left alone, so read the changed sections in full before relying on or sending the result.