Find and Replace Text

Whatever you type in the Find box is searched for literally. Characters that mean something special in a regular expression, such as . * ? ( [ and |, are matched as themselves. Finding 10.00 changes 10.00 and leaves 10x00 alone, and finding a single . replaces every full stop and nothing else.

Every match in the text is replaced, not just the first, and matches are found left to right without overlapping. Replacing aa with b in aaaa gives bb.

Leave the Replace box empty to delete every match. Finding o with an empty replacement turns hello world into hell wrld.

The Case sensitive box starts unticked, so cat also finds Cat and CAT. The replacement is inserted exactly as you typed it, so capitals in the original are lost. There is also no whole-word option, so a match inside a longer word is replaced too:

The original was The cat sat. Cats are great. CAT food. concatenate. To avoid changing parts of words, include the surrounding spaces in both boxes, for example find cat and replace it with dog . That misses a word at the very start or end of the text, or one next to punctuation, so check those by hand.

Case-insensitive matching handles accented letters: café also finds CAFÉ and Café.

A few dollar-sign combinations in the Replace box are read as codes rather than text:

• $$ inserts a single $.
• $& inserts the text that was found. Replacing USD with $& (US) gives USD (US).
• $` and $' insert everything before or after the match, which is almost never what you want.

A dollar sign followed by a digit or a space is inserted normally, so replacing 50 with $50 works. If you need two dollar signs in a row in the output, type four.

• Line breaks can't be searched for. The Find and Replace boxes are single-line, so you can't join or split lines here. To join lines into one, use Text to One Line.
• The result updates as you type. While you are still typing the Find text, short partial matches are replaced in the preview. Finish typing before you copy.
• Your original stays in the top box. The result appears underneath, so you can compare the two or start again without retyping.