Find and Replace
Swap one piece of text for another everywhere it appears, with control over capitals and whole words.
Results
What this tool does
Renaming a product across a long document, fixing a misspelt name in a list, swapping a placeholder for a real value: the job takes seconds in a proper editor and is a nuisance in a browser text box or on a phone. Paste the text, say what to find and what to put in its place, and this page hands it back with the count of how many it changed — which is the number worth checking before you paste the result anywhere.
Formula
swaps every occurrence of what you search for with what you typed, with or without matching case, and only on whole words if you ask for that
Variables
| Symbol | Meaning | Unit |
|---|---|---|
text | Your text | — |
find | Find | — |
replace_with | Replace with | — |
match_case | Match upper and lower case | — |
whole_word | Whole words only | — |
OUT | Result | — |
CT | Replacements made | — |
CB | Characters | — |
CA | Characters after | — |
DF | Change in length | — |
Worked example
- Your textThe cat sat on the mat. The cat was a fine cat, and the catalogue said so.
- Findcat
- Replace withdog
- Match upper and lower caseyes
- Whole words onlyyes
- ResultThe dog sat on the mat. The dog was a fine dog, and the catalogue said so.
- Replacements made3
- Characters74
- Characters after74
- Change in length0
Limitations
- The calculation runs entirely in your browser. The values you type are never sent to a server.
Frequently asked questions
What does "whole words only" actually do?
It refuses to match inside a longer word. Replacing "cat" with "dog" turns "catalogue" into "dogalogue" without it, and leaves it alone with it. The rule is that the letters on either side must not be letters, digits or underscores — so "cat." and "(cat)" still match, but "cats" and "concat" do not. Leave it on unless you are deliberately working on fragments.
Can I use a wildcard or a pattern?
Not here, and that is deliberate: everything you type is treated as the literal text you typed, so a full stop is a full stop and a bracket is a bracket. That is what most replacements need and it is what stops a stray character from quietly matching far more than you meant. If you do need a pattern, the regular expression tester on this site is the page for it.