Find and Replace Text

In plain text mode what you type is taken literally. A full stop, a dollar sign or a bracket is just that character, so you can replace (approx.) or $5.00 without escaping anything.

In regular expression mode the search is a pattern:

In regular expression mode, the replacement understands a few special forms:

• $1, $2 and so on insert the text matched by that group.
• $& inserts the whole match.
• $<name> inserts a named group.
• $$ is a literal dollar sign.

In plain text mode none of these apply, so a replacement containing $1 is inserted exactly as typed.

Whole words only stops cat from changing concat or cats. It uses boundaries that understand letters outside English, so café is treated as one word, and digits and underscores count as part of a word.

Tick Read \n and \t as line break and tab to type those escapes into the find or replace fields. Replacing , with \n turns a comma-separated list into one item per line, and the reverse is the same swap.

Some regular expressions take exponentially longer as the text grows, because the engine tries every way of dividing it up. In an ordinary page that freezes the tab.

Patterns here run in a background worker with a two-second limit. If one exceeds it, it is stopped and you are told, and the page stays responsive. The usual cause is nested repetition such as (a+)+. To experiment with a pattern and see every match, use the regex tester.