Find and replace text instantly, with case-sensitive, whole-word, and regular expression modes. See a live match count, highlighted matches, and replace the first match or every match at once.
By default, this tool searches for your Find text as plain, literal characters with no special interpretation — what you type is exactly what gets matched, character for character, regardless of any punctuation or symbols involved. Whole Word Only adds a boundary requirement on top of that: a match only counts if it appears as a complete standalone word, not as a fragment embedded inside a longer word. Regex Mode replaces literal matching entirely with full regular expression pattern matching, unlocking wildcards, character classes, alternation, and capture groups for much more powerful and flexible searches. These three modes can be combined — for instance, a regex pattern with whole-word boundaries enforced — giving you fine-grained control over exactly what counts as a match.
Case sensitivity determines whether 'Word' and 'word' are treated as the same text or as genuinely different text — appropriate default behavior depends heavily on context: prose and everyday text usually benefits from case-insensitive matching (so you don't have to search separately for every capitalization variant), while code, proper nouns, or anything where case carries real meaning usually benefits from case-sensitive matching instead. Whole-word matching solves a different, very common problem: without it, searching for a short word like 'cat' would also match that same sequence of letters buried inside longer, unrelated words like 'category' or 'concatenate' — Whole Word Only prevents these accidental partial matches by requiring your search term to stand alone as its own complete word.
Literal text matching works well when you know exactly what you're looking for, character for character — but plenty of real-world find-and-replace needs involve a pattern rather than one fixed string: any sequence of digits, any word starting with a capital letter, one of several alternative spellings, or text following a specific structural pattern. Regular expressions (regex) are a widely-used, standardized mini-language for describing exactly this kind of pattern, supported natively by JavaScript (and by nearly every modern programming language). Enabling Regex Mode in this tool switches your Find text from literal matching into full regex pattern matching, and further lets your Replace text reference captured groups from the pattern using `$1`, `$2`, and so on — letting you not just find pattern-based matches, but restructure the matched text intelligently based on its own captured pieces.
Rather than blindly running a replace operation and hoping it did what you expected, this tool highlights every current match directly in a live preview as you type your Find pattern and adjust the matching toggles — so you can visually confirm exactly which parts of your text would be affected before committing to an actual replacement. This is especially valuable once Regex Mode is involved, since regex patterns can sometimes match more (or less) than a first glance at the pattern might suggest; seeing the actual highlighted matches removes the guesswork and lets you refine your pattern interactively until it's highlighting precisely the text you intend to replace.
Replace All is the more commonly used action, applying your replacement to every single match found throughout the entire text in one step — the right choice whenever you want a change applied consistently everywhere it occurs. Replace First is useful in narrower situations: when you specifically want to fix or change just one occurrence (perhaps the very first mention of a term, while leaving later, intentionally different mentions untouched), or when you're testing a Find pattern's behavior on a single match before committing to replacing every instance across a longer document. Since both actions use the exact same Find pattern, Replace text, and toggle settings, you can freely try Replace First first to sanity-check the result, then switch to Replace All once you're confident the pattern is doing exactly what you expect.
Find and Replace handles targeted text substitution, including regex patterns. These related text tools cover other everyday text cleanup and analysis tasks.