✏ Text Tools

Find and Replace Text

Run multiple find and replace rules simultaneously. Each rule has its own regex toggle, case-sensitivity toggle and live match count. All replacements are previewed before you apply them.

Multi-rule replacement Regex per rule Live match highlighting Preview before apply

AdSense — 728×90 Leaderboard

Source text 0 chars

Result 0 chars

Matches: 0

Replacement rules 1 rule

AdSense — 728×90 Leaderboard

🧩

Need more powerful pattern matching?

The Regex Tester lets you build and debug complex regular expressions with live highlighting, capture group extraction and a 30+ pattern library.

Regex Tester →

⭐ Ratings

Rate this tool

4.8

★★★★★

Based on 19,384 ratings

17,058

1,357

582

194

Did this save you time on bulk text replacement?

Thank you for the feedback!

Features

Multi-rule replacement with regex, live highlighting and preview

Every free online find and replace tool does one replacement at a time. This tool lets you define up to 10 replacement rules simultaneously, each with its own pattern, replacement, regex toggle and case-sensitivity setting. All rules run in sequence and the result is previewed before you apply it.

Multi-rule replacement

Add up to 10 find/replace rule pairs. All rules run in order on the source text in one operation. Each rule has its own match count so you can see how many times each pattern matched.

Regex per rule

Toggle regex mode on/off for each individual rule. Mix plain text replacements with regex replacements in the same operation. Back-references ($1, $2) work in replacement strings for regex rules.

Case sensitivity per rule

Each rule has an independent case-sensitive toggle. Replace "HTTP" and "http" differently in the same pass, or use case-insensitive matching for one rule and exact case for another.

Live match highlighting

Each rule's matches are highlighted in the source text in a distinct colour as you type. The highlight layer updates in real time so you can see what each rule will affect before applying.

Preview before apply

The result panel shows a preview of the replaced text. Apply fills it with the final result. Copy result puts it on your clipboard. The source text is never modified until you explicitly apply.

Auto-apply mode

Toggle Auto-apply to update the result panel automatically as you change rules or source text, without clicking Apply each time. Useful when iterating on a set of rules interactively.

How to use

How to find and replace text with multiple rules

Paste your source text

Paste or type the text you want to process in the Source text panel. The character count updates as you type. You can also click Load sample to fill in an example to try the tool immediately.

Enter your find and replace rules

Each rule row has a Find field and a Replace field. Type the text to find on the left and the replacement on the right. Toggle the Rx button to switch a rule to regex mode. Toggle Aa for case sensitivity. Click + Add another rule to add more rules.

Watch the live highlighting

Each rule's matches are highlighted in the source text in a distinct colour. The match count for each rule updates in real time. If a rule has a regex error, it shows a red error message below that rule row.

Apply and copy the result

Click Apply replacements to run all rules in order and show the result. Click Copy result to copy the output to your clipboard. Rules are applied top-to-bottom, so the order matters when rules interact.

Comparison

LazyTools vs other online find and replace tools

Feature	⭐ LazyTools	textmechanic.com	tools4noobs.com	Notepad++ (desktop)
Plain text replace	✔	✔	✔	✔
Regex replace	✔ per rule	✔	Limited	✔
Multiple rules at once	✔ up to 10	✘	✘	✘ (one at a time)
Case sensitivity per rule	✔	Global only	✔	✔
Live match highlighting	✔	✘	✘	✔
Match count per rule	✔	✘	✘	✔
Preview before apply	✔	✘	✘	✔
No install / online	✔	✔	✔	✘ (desktop app)

Quick reference

Regex syntax for find and replace

Pattern	Matches
\d+	One or more digits
\s+	One or more whitespace characters
\b\w+\b	A whole word
^	Start of each line (with m flag)
$	End of each line (with m flag)
[A-Z]	Any uppercase letter
(foo\|bar)	Either "foo" or "bar"
.+?	Any chars (lazy, shortest match)

Replacement	Inserts
$1	First capture group match
$2	Second capture group match
$&	The entire matched string
$$	A literal dollar sign
\n	Newline (in replacement string)
\t	Tab (in replacement string)

Complete guide

Find and Replace Text Online — Bulk Text Replacement Guide

Find and replace is the most fundamental text editing operation after typing and deleting. In text editors and word processors, it is a single search term replaced with a single replacement term. For bulk content processing — renaming variables across code, standardising terminology in a document, cleaning up exported data, or preparing text for publication — you often need to apply 5, 10 or 20 replacements in a single pass. This tool is built for that use case.

Find and replace text online free with regex

Regex (regular expression) find and replace is far more powerful than plain text replacement because patterns can match variable content. For example, the plain text replacement "2024" only matches the literal string "2024", while the regex pattern 202[345] matches 2023, 2024 or 2025. More practically, the pattern (\w+)@(\w+)\.(\w+) matches any email address and the replacement $1 at $2 dot $3 converts it to a human-readable form. Each rule in this tool can be switched to regex mode independently, so you can mix plain text and regex rules in the same pass.

Bulk find replace multiple terms at once

The multi-rule approach is the defining feature of this tool. Common use cases for simultaneous multi-rule replacement: updating multiple brand names or product names in a marketing document, replacing multiple variable names across a code snippet, converting multiple HTML entities to their character equivalents, standardising multiple date formats, removing multiple types of boilerplate text, or replacing multiple regional spelling variants (colour/color, fulfil/fulfill) in one operation. Rules are applied in the order they are listed, top to bottom, so if one replacement produces text that matches a later rule, that rule will also fire.

Online text editor with find and replace

This tool is designed as an online replacement for the find-and-replace functionality in desktop text editors like Notepad++ and Sublime Text, when you do not have access to those applications or need to share a text processing workflow with someone who does not have them installed. The result panel acts as the output buffer — you paste in your source text, configure your rules, apply the replacements and copy the output, without needing to install or open any application.

Frequently asked questions

Does the order of rules matter?▼

Yes. Rules are applied top to bottom in sequence. The output of rule 1 becomes the input to rule 2, the output of rule 2 becomes the input to rule 3, and so on. This means if rule 1 replaces "foo" with "bar" and rule 2 replaces "bar" with "baz", all original occurrences of "foo" will end up as "baz" in the final output (because rule 1 changed them to "bar" first, then rule 2 changed them to "baz"). This sequential chaining is intentional and allows you to build multi-step transformations. Reorder rules by dragging or by deleting and re-adding them in a different position.

How do I use capture groups in the replacement?▼

In regex mode, you can use parentheses in the Find pattern to create capture groups and reference them in the Replace field with $1, $2, etc. For example, find pattern (\d{4})-(\d{2})-(\d{2}) with replacement $3/$2/$1 converts ISO dates (2025-01-15) to European format (15/01/2025). The $& reference inserts the entire match without modification. Use $$ to insert a literal dollar sign in the replacement string. Named groups (?<name>pattern) can be referenced as $<name> in the replacement.

What is the difference between case-sensitive and case-insensitive matching?▼

Case-sensitive matching (the default with the Aa toggle on) treats uppercase and lowercase letters as different. Searching for "Hello" will not match "hello", "HELLO" or "hElLo". Case-insensitive matching (Aa toggle off) treats all letter cases as equivalent, so "Hello" matches "hello", "HELLO" and any other capitalisation. In regex mode, case-insensitive matching applies the i flag to the regular expression. Each rule in this tool has its own independent Aa toggle, so you can make some rules case-sensitive and others not within the same replacement operation.

Can I replace text with nothing (delete it)?▼

Yes. Leave the Replace field empty to delete all matches of the Find pattern. For example, entering <[^>]+> in Find (with regex mode on) and leaving Replace empty will strip all HTML tags from the text. Entering \s{2,} in Find and a single space in Replace will collapse multiple consecutive spaces to a single space. Entering ^\s+$ (regex, multiline) and leaving Replace empty will remove blank lines.

How do I match whole words only?▼

Enable regex mode and use word boundary anchors: \b before and after your search term. For example, \bcat\b matches the word "cat" but not "catfish", "concatenate" or "cats". The \b anchor matches the position between a word character (letter, digit or underscore) and a non-word character. For a word with hyphens like "e-mail", use a more specific pattern like (^|\s)e-mail(\s|$) since hyphens are not word characters. In plain text mode without regex, the tool matches substrings, so "cat" would match inside "catfish".

What is the maximum number of rules?▼

You can add up to 10 replacement rules in this tool. For most practical bulk replacement tasks, 10 rules is more than sufficient. If you need more than 10 simultaneous replacements, consider splitting the operation into two passes: apply the first 10 rules, copy the result, paste it back as the source text and apply the next set of rules. Alternatively, if your replacements follow a regular pattern, a single regex rule with alternation (rule1|rule2|rule3) can cover many cases in one rule.

Does this tool handle newlines and line breaks?▼

Yes. The text area supports multi-line text. In plain text mode, you cannot search for or replace newlines directly through the input field. In regex mode, \n in the Find pattern matches a newline character. The . wildcard does not match newlines by default; use [\s\S] to match any character including newlines, or enable the s (dotAll) flag variant. The ^ and $ anchors match start and end of lines (not just the whole string) when you add (?m) at the start of your regex pattern, which enables multiline mode.

Can I save my rules for later use?▼

Rules are not automatically saved between sessions. To preserve a useful set of rules, copy the Find and Replace values into a text document or spreadsheet and paste them back next time you use the tool. For repeatable bulk processing tasks that you perform regularly, consider using a scripting language: Python's re.sub() function, JavaScript's String.replace() with a regex, or command-line tools like sed (stream editor) which is specifically designed for find-and-replace on files and can process thousands of files in a single command.

Related tools