Find and replace without opening an editor
Every text editor and word processor buries find and replace behind a menu, a keyboard shortcut you have to remember, and a dialog box that only works inside that one application. This tool skips all of that. Paste any block of text — a document draft, a CSV export, a chunk of code, a list of URLs — into the box on the left, type what you're searching for and what should replace it, and the result appears instantly on the right. There's no button to click, no popup to dismiss, and nothing to install. It works as well for a one-off cleanup as it does for find and replace online jobs across a long document, handling bulk replace text in one pass, and because everything runs locally in your browser, nothing you paste is ever uploaded, logged, or stored anywhere.
The three matching options explained
Three checkboxes control how your search term is matched, and they can be combined. Case sensitive treats uppercase and lowercase letters as different characters, so searching for "cat" only touches "cat" and leaves "Cat" or "CAT" alone; leave it unchecked and all three are treated the same, which is the default for typical search and replace text work. Whole word adds a boundary check so your search term must stand on its own — searching for "cat" with whole word on replaces the standalone word "cat" but skips past "catalog" or "concatenate", where "cat" is only a fragment of a longer word. Regular expression switches the find box from a plain literal search to a full regex pattern, unlocking things a literal search can never do: matching any digit, any run of whitespace, or capturing pieces of the match to reuse in the replacement for online regex replace work. Combine case sensitivity or whole word with regex mode and both still apply to the pattern you write.
A gentle introduction to regular expressions
Regular expressions have a reputation for looking like line noise, but you only need a
handful of building blocks to do useful work. \d matches any single digit, so
\d+ matches one or more digits in a row — useful for finding a number wherever
it appears, regardless of its length. \s matches any whitespace character, so
\s+ matches a run of one or more spaces, tabs, or line breaks, which is exactly
how you collapse multiple spaces down to one. Parentheses create a capture group, which
remembers the text a piece of your pattern matched so you can reuse it in the replacement
using $1, $2, $3, and so on, in order. For example,
matching a date written as (\d+)-(\d+)-(\d+) captures the year, month, and day
as three separate groups; writing $3/$2/$1 as the replacement reassembles them
in a different order, turning 2026-08-03 into 03/08/2026 without retyping a single digit.
None of this requires memorizing a syntax reference — start with \d,
\s, and a capture group or two, and you can already handle most everyday text
cleanup.
Examples: dates, phone numbers, extra spaces
A few worked examples, all verified in this tool. To reformat a date, turn on
Regular expression, search for (\d+)-(\d+)-(\d+), and replace
with $3/$2/$1 — running it on 2026-08-03 produces
03/08/2026, with 1 replacement made. To strip a phone number down to digits
only, handy before pasting numbers into a spreadsheet, turn on
Regular expression, search for \D (any non-digit character),
and leave the replacement empty; running it on (555) 123-4567 produces
5551234567, with 4 replacements made. To collapse extra spaces left behind by
a copy-paste from a PDF or an email, turn on Regular expression, search for
\s+ (one or more whitespace characters), and replace with a single space;
running it on This has extra spaces produces
This has extra spaces, with 3 replacements made. Each of these is a plain
example you can paste in and adjust for your own text.