Find and Replace Text Online (With Regex Support)

# Find and Replace Text Online: The Complete Guide

Need to swap every instance of "colour" with "color"? Remove a recurring prefix from 200 lines? Or apply a regex transformation across an entire file? FreeToolJet's Find and Replace tool handles all of these in your browser — no text editor required.

Features

• Case-sensitive matching: Only replace "Error" when "error" should stay untouched.
• Whole word matching: Replace "log" without affecting "dialog" or "catalog".
• Regex mode: Use patterns like /d{3}-d{4}/ to find phone numbers, or /(?<=@)w+/ to extract usernames.
• Match count: See how many matches exist before committing to the replacement.

Common Use Cases

• Normalize terminology across documentation.
• Reformat dates, phone numbers, or IDs in bulk.
• Strip HTML tags or Markdown formatting from pasted content.
• Clean up data exports before importing into a spreadsheet.

Regex Examples for Find and Replace

Related Tools

• Whitespace Remover — Clean up spacing after replacements
• Text Case Converter — Change capitalization in bulk
• Sort Lines — Organize output alphabetically

Want more tools? Explore our full collection at FreeToolJet - we're constantly adding new utilities based on developer feedback.

## Advanced Find and Replace Techniques

Beyond simple text substitution, find and replace supports several powerful techniques:

• Case-insensitive matching: Replace hello, Hello, and HELLO in one pass
• Whole word matching: Replace cat without affecting category or concatenate
• Regular expressions: Match patterns like email addresses, phone numbers, or URLs
• Capture groups: Reorder parts of a match (e.g., swap first and last names)
• Multi-line replacement: Operate across line breaks for reformatting documents

Common Use Cases

• Data cleaning: Remove phone number formatting ((123) 456-7890 → 1234567890) for database import
• Code refactoring: Rename a variable or function across an entire project
• Format conversion: Convert date formats (MM/DD/YYYY → YYYY-MM-DD)
• Markdown cleanup: Replace smart quotes with straight quotes, fix em-dashes
• Log processing: Extract IP addresses or error codes from log files

Find and Replace in Different Editors

• VS Code: Ctrl+H (Cmd+Option+F on Mac). Toggle the regex icon for pattern matching. Supports $1, $2 for capture group references in the replacement.
• Sublime Text: Ctrl+H. Similar to VS Code, supports regex and capture groups.
• Vim: :%s/old/new/g for global replacement. Add c flag for confirmation: :%s/old/new/gc.
• sed: sed 's/old/new/g' file.txt. Use -i for in-place editing. Requires escaping special characters.