The Find and Replace tool performs text substitutions in any pasted text, supporting plain text matching, case-insensitive matching, and full regular expression patterns. Enter the search term in the find field, enter the replacement in the replace field, and see the substituted text in real time. The match count shows how many replacements were made. The regex mode allows for complex pattern matching: replace all HTML tags, extract specific patterns, transform dates between formats, or normalize inconsistent text. The tool is a faster alternative to opening a text editor for simple substitutions, and supports more powerful regex replacements than what most text editors expose in their find-and-replace dialog. All processing runs in your browser with no data sent to any server. To extend the output further, Regex Tester can test and debug regular expressions, Whitespace Remover can strip extra whitespace from text, and Text Diff Checker can compare two texts and highlight differences.
Regular expression replacements in the find-and-replace tool support capture groups, which enable transformations that simple substitution cannot. For example, changing date format from MM/DD/YYYY to YYYY-MM-DD uses capture groups: find (d{2})/(d{2})/(d{4}) and replace with $3-$1-$2, where $1, $2, $3 refer to the first, second, and third capture group. Wrapping all URLs in anchor tags uses: find (https?://[^s]+) and replace with <a href="$1">$1</a>. Removing all HTML tags uses: find <[^>]*> and replace with nothing (empty replacement). Common text cleaning tasks include normalizing multiple spaces to a single space (find s+ replace with a space), removing trailing whitespace (find [ ]+$ in multiline mode), removing empty lines (find ^ in multiline mode), and adding a prefix to every line (find ^ in multiline mode, replace with the desired prefix). The replace-all versus replace-first option is important: replace-first is useful when you want to make a targeted change to only the first occurrence, while replace-all is the standard behavior for bulk transformation. The case-insensitive flag (the i flag in regex) allows matching text regardless of capitalization, useful for normalizing mixed-case content.