Find and Replace Text Online — Free with Regex & Bulk Replace

How to Use Find and Replace Online

Getting started with Pixab AI's find and replace tool takes seconds. Begin by pasting your text — an email draft, a block of code, a CSV file, or any body of text — into the large text area at the top of the tool. The text stays entirely in your browser; nothing is sent to any server.

Type the word or phrase you want to locate into the Find field. As you type, a live match counter appears on the right side of the options row showing exactly how many occurrences exist in your text. This live preview helps you confirm that your search term is correct before you make any changes.

Enter your replacement text in the Replace with field. Then choose your strategy: click Replace All to swap every occurrence in one shot, or click Replace Next to step through matches one by one and decide which ones to replace. The Undo button rolls back the last replacement so you can safely experiment without fear of destroying your text.

For power users, enable the Regex checkbox to write full regular expressions in the Find field. The tool validates your pattern in real time and shows a clear error message directly below the input if the expression is invalid, so you never need to guess why a pattern is not working. If you need to replace several different terms at once, switch to the Bulk Replace tab and list your pairs in find|replace format, one pair per line. Click Bulk Replace and all substitutions run in sequence. When you are satisfied with the result, click Copy output to put the modified text on your clipboard.

Regex Basics for Beginners

Regular expressions (regex) are patterns that describe text rather than matching it literally. When you enable the Regex toggle in our find and replace tool, the Find field accepts these patterns, giving you extraordinary power over your text. Here are the five patterns you will use most often:

\d+ — Match Numbers

\d matches any single digit (0–9). The + quantifier means “one or more.” So \d+ matches any sequence of digits: 5, 42, 1000, or 20240101. Practical example: you have a list of phone numbers and want to redact them. Find \d+ and replace with ### to mask every run of digits in the document at once.

\s+ — Match Whitespace

\s matches any whitespace character — spaces, tabs, and newlines. \s+ matches one or more consecutive whitespace characters. Practical example: clean up extra spaces between words by finding \s+ and replacing with a single space. This collapses any number of spaces or tabs between words down to one, normalising the text without you having to count spaces manually. You can also use our Text Cleaner for whitespace-specific operations.

[A-Z] — Match Uppercase Letters

Square brackets define a character class. [A-Z] matches any single uppercase letter from A to Z. Practical example: if you want to find all sentences that begin with a capital letter and check them, use [A-Z][^.!?]+[.!?] to match complete sentences. Or use [A-Z]{2,} (two or more uppercase letters in a row) to catch ALL-CAPS acronyms and abbreviations in a document and replace them with lower-case versions.

.* — Match Anything

The dot . matches any single character except a newline. .* matches zero or more of any character — essentially “anything.” Practical example: to strip HTML tags from text, find <.*?> (using *? for non-greedy matching) and replace with nothing. This removes every HTML tag while leaving the text content intact.

^ and $ — Start and End of Line

^ anchors the pattern to the beginning of a line; $ anchors it to the end. Practical example: to add a bullet point to the start of every line in a list, find ^ and replace with • . To remove trailing spaces from every line, find \s+$ and replace with nothing. These anchors are essential when working with structured text like CSV rows, log files, or numbered lists. For more structured text operations, try our Sort Lines tool.

Find and Replace vs Ctrl+F — Why a Dedicated Tool Has Advantages

The Ctrl+F shortcut in your browser or word processor finds text, and most applications include a basic replace function. But a dedicated online find and replace tool offers several advantages that built-in tools cannot match.

First, browser Ctrl+F searches only within the rendered page — it cannot search inside text areas or editable fields. A dedicated tool lets you search and replace within any body of text you paste in, regardless of where that text came from.

Second, most word processors hide regex support behind advanced settings menus. Our tool exposes regex with a single toggle and validates patterns instantly, making it faster to iterate on complex patterns. Third, the bulk replace feature — replacing multiple different terms in a single pass — simply does not exist in standard Ctrl+H dialogs. If you need to rename ten variables across a document, you would normally run ten separate replace operations; bulk replace does them all at once. For counting words in the result, use our Word Counter.

Bulk Replace Use Cases

The bulk replace feature is one of the most time-saving capabilities in the tool. Instead of running separate find-and-replace operations for each term, you list all your pairs in find|replace format — one per line — and the tool processes them all in a single click.

Cleaning CSV Data

Exported CSV files often contain inconsistencies: column headers in SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE when your database expects snake_case, “N/A” values that should be empty strings, or currency symbols mixed with numeric values. With bulk replace, you can normalise all these inconsistencies in one operation. For example: N/A|, $||, USD| removes the symbols without a separate step for each one.

Updating URLs in Bulk

When a website migrates from HTTP to HTTPS, or when a domain changes, documents, emails, and code files can contain hundreds of old URLs. Bulk replace lets you list every variant of the old URL — with and without www, with and without trailing slashes — and map each to the new equivalent. This is far faster than running individual searches in a text editor.

Replacing Old Brand Names

After a company rebrand, internal documents, marketing copy, and legal texts need systematic updates. A product renamed from “Acme Widget Pro” to “WidgetCloud” may appear in dozens of variants: full name, abbreviated, with trademark symbols. Bulk replace handles all variants in one pass, saving hours of manual search-and-review.

Removing Sensitive Information

Before sharing a document externally, you may need to redact phone numbers, email addresses, or specific names. Bulk replace with regex-style literal matching lets you list every piece of sensitive text and replace it with a placeholder like [REDACTED] simultaneously. After bulk replace, run our Word Counter to confirm the document length has not changed unexpectedly.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does this tool support regular expressions?

Yes. Enable the Regex checkbox and the Find field accepts any valid JavaScript regular expression. The tool validates the pattern in real time and shows a clear error message below the input if the expression is invalid.

Is my text uploaded to a server?

No. All find and replace operations run entirely in your browser using JavaScript. Your text is never transmitted to any server, making this tool safe for confidential documents, proprietary code, and personal data.

How many replacement pairs can I use in bulk mode?

There is no enforced limit. The tool processes each pair sequentially, so very large lists (hundreds of pairs) on very large texts may take a fraction of a second longer, but there is no hard cap.

What does the Whole Word option do?

When Whole Word is enabled, the tool only matches the search term when it appears as a complete word — surrounded by word boundaries like spaces, punctuation, or the start/end of the text. For example, searching for “cat” with Whole Word enabled will not match “concatenate” or “category.”

Can I undo multiple replacements?

The Undo button rolls back one replacement at a time, up to 20 steps. Each click of Replace All, Replace Next, or Bulk Replace is stored as a separate undo step.

Does Match Case affect regex mode?

Yes. When Match Case is enabled alongside Regex, the regular expression uses the case-sensitive flag (g only). When Match Case is off, the case-insensitive flag (gi) is added, making the pattern match regardless of letter case.

What format does Bulk Replace use?

Each line in the bulk pairs field should follow the format find|replace — the text to find on the left of the pipe character, the replacement on the right. To replace a term with nothing (delete it), leave the right side empty: unwanted text|. Lines without a pipe character are ignored.