🔁 Find and Replace Text

What is the Find and Replace Text?

Find and replace is one of the most common text editing jobs there is: you have a block of text and you need to change every occurrence of a word or phrase into something else. Doing it by hand is slow and error-prone, especially when the same term appears dozens of times. A find and replace tool scans the entire text and performs the swap consistently, then tells you how many changes it made so you can sanity-check the result.

The behaviour you want depends on the job. "Replace all" changes every match and is the right default for bulk edits like updating a product name throughout a page. Turning it off replaces only the first match, which is handy when you want to fix one specific spot. "Case-insensitive" makes the search ignore capitalisation, so a search for "color" also catches "Color" and "COLOR". "Match whole word" stops a search for "cat" from also hitting "category" or "scatter", by only matching when the term stands alone between word boundaries.

Under the hood this tool treats your find term as plain literal text, not a pattern. That matters because characters like a dot, dollar sign, or bracket have special meaning in pattern matching. The tool automatically escapes those characters, so searching for "a.b" matches the literal "a.b" and not "axb". This keeps the behaviour predictable: what you type in the Find box is exactly what gets matched, and your replacement text is inserted exactly as written.

When to use it

• Renaming a product, brand, or person throughout a long document in one pass.
• Cleaning up pasted text by replacing double spaces, stray characters, or curly quotes.
• Updating URLs, file paths, or placeholder tokens across a block of code or config.
• Swapping British spellings for American ones (or the reverse) before publishing.

How to use the Find and Replace Text

1. Paste or type your text into the large text box.
2. Enter the word or phrase to look for in the Find field.
3. Enter what it should become in the Replace with field (leave it empty to delete the matches).
4. Toggle Replace all, Case-insensitive, or Match whole word to suit the job.
5. Press Replace, read the count of changes made, then use Copy to grab the result.

Formula & method

Worked examples

What each option does

Common cleanup replacements

Common mistakes to avoid

• Forgetting case sensitivity. By default the search matches the exact case you typed, so "color" will not catch "Color". Turn on Case-insensitive when capitalisation should not matter.
• Matching inside larger words by accident. Replacing "is" without whole-word on will also change "this", "island", and "vision". Turn on Match whole word when you only mean the standalone term.
• Replacing only the first match unintentionally. If Replace all is off, only the first occurrence changes. For a bulk edit across the whole document, keep Replace all on (it is the default).
• Expecting wildcards or patterns to work. This tool matches your find term as literal text, so symbols like a dot or asterisk match those exact characters, not a pattern. That is intentional and keeps results predictable.

Glossary

Match

A spot in your text where the find term appears, according to your case and whole-word settings.

Case-insensitive

A search mode that treats upper and lower case as the same, so "Text" and "text" both match.

Whole word

A match that stands alone between word boundaries, so "cat" matches only the word cat and not parts of other words.

Replace all

Changing every match in the text at once, rather than just the first occurrence.

Escaping

Treating special characters such as a dot or bracket as ordinary literal text rather than pattern symbols.

Frequently asked questions