Find and replace text

FileGizmo finds and replaces literal words, phrases, or regular-expression matches without sending your text to a server. Paste the source text, enter what to find, and provide replacement text. Choose whether matching is case-sensitive and whether to replace the first occurrence or every occurrence, then review the read-only result before copying or downloading it.

Literal mode treats punctuation and symbols exactly as entered, which is the safest default for ordinary editing. Regex mode is available for structured changes and reports malformed expressions instead of silently changing the document. Replacement counts make the result easy to verify. Empty search values are rejected because matching every position would produce confusing output.

The work happens in a browser worker, keeping the editor responsive for larger notes, logs, code, and lists. Output is downloadable as UTF-8 plain text through FileGizmo’s standard result contract. Always review replacements involving names, identifiers, or source code because a technically correct global match can still change text you intended to keep.

Literal mode treats what you type as the characters you typed. Searching for 1.5 finds one, a full stop, five, rather than one followed by any character followed by five, and searching for C++ finds it instead of failing as an invalid pattern. This is the mode most people want and the one many tools quietly get wrong.

Regular-expression mode is there when you need it, with capture groups usable in the replacement. That covers reformatting a column of dates or swapping the two halves of a list, neither of which literal replacement can do.

The number of replacements is reported. A count of zero distinguishes a search that found nothing from a replacement that did nothing visible, and those two look identical in the output.

The usual reasons are a name that changed across a document, a URL that moved, or placeholder text that has to be filled in consistently. All of them are risky by hand, because the eye reliably skips the occurrence buried in the middle of a paragraph.

The text stays in the page, which matters when it is a draft contract or anything containing names.