When to use it
Find and Replace changes every occurrence of a word or phrase in a piece of text at once. Use it to update a product or company name throughout a document, fix a word you’ve misspelled many times, change date formats, remove unwanted words, swap British and American spellings, or clean up data before pasting it into a spreadsheet.
How to find and replace text
- Paste your text into Your text, or press Example.
- Type what to look for in Find (for example “order”).
- Type the new text in Replace with, or leave it empty to delete the matches.
- Choose options: Match capital letters, Whole words only or Use regular expression.
- Read the Result and the note showing how many replacements were made.
- Press Copy result or Download .txt.
A worked example
Your company changed its name from “Brightline” to “Northlight”, and you have a 1,200-word “About us” text to update. Paste it in, find “Brightline”, replace with “Northlight”, and tick Whole words only so “Brightlines” in an old URL isn’t half-changed by accident. The note says “14 replacements made”. Skim the result, then copy it back into your website editor.
Regular expression examples
- Remove all numbers: find
\d+, replace with nothing. - Swap “Smith, Ana” to “Ana Smith”: find
(\w+), (\w+), replace with$2 $1. - Remove spaces before commas: find
+,, replace with,. - Change dates from 2026-03-14 to 14/03/2026: find
(\d{4})-(\d{2})-(\d{2}), replace with$3/$2/$1.
If a pattern is invalid, the tool explains the problem instead of guessing.
Tips
- Check the count: an unexpectedly high number means the search is too broad.
- Use Whole words only for short words like “it”, “in” or “on”.
- Do one change at a time and check the result before the next.
Common mistakes
- Replacing a short word without Whole words only, turning “cat” into “dog” inside “location” (“lodogion”).
- Forgetting capital letters when they matter, such as names at the start of sentences.
- Typing . or ? with “Use regular expression” ticked. In patterns they mean “any character” and “optional”; leave the option off to search for them as plain text.
Private by design
Your text never leaves your browser.
Related tools
Compare before and after with Text Compare, change capitalisation with the Case Converter, or tidy spacing with Remove Extra Spaces.