How to Find and Replace Text Online (Free, Regex)

Fixing the same word a hundred times by hand is the kind of busywork computers were built to kill. Whether you are correcting a misspelled name, swapping a term across a document, or reformatting data, find and replace does it in one click. This guide shows you how to find and replace text with the free Find and Replace tool, including match-case and full regular-expression support and a live count of how many replacements were made. It runs in your browser, so your text stays private.

What find and replace does

Find and replace scans your text for every instance of a search term and swaps it for a replacement, all at once. Instead of hunting through paragraphs, you describe what to find and what to put in its place, and the tool updates the entire document.

The Find and Replace tool supports two power features. Match case makes the search respect capitalization, so Cat and cat are treated as different. Regular expressions (regex) let you match patterns rather than fixed text, such as any number, any email, or text between two markers, which unlocks complex edits that plain search cannot do.

How to use the Find and Replace tool

Follow these steps:

1. Open the Find and Replace tool and paste your text.
2. Type the word or phrase to find in the Find box.
3. Type what it should become in the Replace box (leave it empty to delete the matches).
4. Optionally turn on match case to respect capitalization.
5. Optionally turn on regex to match patterns instead of exact text.
6. Apply the replacement. The result and a live count of replacements appear instantly.
7. Click Copy to use the edited text.

Before and after: an example

Imagine a draft that uses the wrong product name throughout:

Paste a paragraph that mentions Acme five times, type Acme in Find and Apex in Replace, and the tool reports 5 replacements and shows the corrected text. For a regex example, searching for the pattern matching multiple spaces and replacing it with a single space cleans up uneven spacing across the whole document in one pass.

Common uses for find and replace

Bulk replacement saves time everywhere:

• Renaming: swap a person, product, or brand name across a document.
• Formatting: convert commas to new lines, collapse extra spaces, or standardize punctuation.
• Data cleanup: strip prefixes, fix delimiters, or normalize inconsistent text.
• Code and config: rename a variable or path throughout a file.
• Removing text: delete unwanted phrases by replacing them with nothing.

Pair it with Sort Text Lines to reorganize after editing, or Remove Duplicate Lines to tidy lists.

Tips and common mistakes

Replace carefully:

• Watch for partial matches. Searching for cat also matches category and concatenate. Use regex word boundaries, or include surrounding spaces, to target whole words.
• Use match case to avoid surprises. Without it, replacing US could also catch the us in business.
• Test regex before trusting it. Patterns are powerful but easy to overreach. Check the replacement count to confirm it matched what you expected.
• Empty replace deletes. Leaving the Replace box blank removes every match, which is great for stripping text but easy to do by accident.
• Keep the original. Copy your source text somewhere before a big regex replace, in case you need to redo it.

Your text stays in your browser

The Find and Replace tool runs entirely in your browser. Your document is never uploaded to a server and nothing is stored, so confidential drafts, internal data, and private code stay on your own device. There is no account and no tracking of what you paste. When you have finished editing, explore the other free text tools or the full text category for sorting, counting, and cleaning that all work the same private way.