Find and replace text

Define exactly which occurrences should change

Write the intended edit as a rule a colleague could apply. “Change draft to review copy” is not enough if the text also contains draftboard, a document named draft_2 or a heading written as Draft. Decide whether those occurrences are separate words, technical names or exceptions before choosing the settings. Keep the original if the edit will be reviewed or pasted back into a shared document.

Paste a representative section first. Include one match you expect to change and one near match you expect to keep. Put the exact text in the search field and the intended replacement in the second field. Read the preview before copying or applying it. A match count is useful as a sanity check, but the number alone cannot tell you whether the tool changed the right three occurrences.

This is a literal tool, not a regular expression editor. A period, dollar sign and opening bracket are ordinary characters in the pattern. Replacement text is literal too, so it does not expand captured groups or variables. Use a separate editor with a deliberately tested pattern if your task requires changing a different value on every match. A simpler literal search is easier to review when the actual change is one fixed phrase.

Check boundaries with a word, a compound and an identifier

Try this sample with draft in the search field and review copy in the replacement field. Enable Match case and Whole words only.

Tag the draft before filing.
    Keep draftboard and draft_2 unchanged.
    The Draft label is a heading.

The first line should change. The text in draftboard and draft_2 stays because letters and underscores count as word characters. The capitalized heading stays because case matching is on. If you disable case matching, check what happens to the heading: the replacement uses the spelling you typed and does not automatically preserve the old capitalization.

A hyphen can separate word boundaries even when a reader thinks of the whole expression as one compound. Test terms such as draft-only or draft-based if they occur in the real text. If those should not change, narrow the match to a longer phrase around the intended occurrence. A possessive or punctuation next to a name can also produce a different outcome from a bare word. Work from examples copied from the source rather than imagining every boundary.

Distinguish replacing a phrase, deleting it and removing a row

Leave the replacement field empty to delete the literal matches. The preview can show a small marker at a deletion point; the marker is not included in the copied or downloaded result. Inspect the surrounding characters after each example deletion. Removing a word can leave an extra space, punctuation without its phrase or two adjacent words that were supposed to remain separate. The tool does not rewrite the sentence to make it grammatical.

For a marker such as [DRAFT], decide whether the spaces next to it are part of what should go. If the same marker occurs at the start of a line and in the middle of a sentence, deleting it with one rule can leave different whitespace on each. Make separate passes when necessary and compare the results. Use Clean whitespace only after checking which spaces are accidental.

If you want to discard an entire line that contains a term, use Filter matching lines. A replacement can remove the matched word but still leave the rest of the line behind. For a set of unrelated punctuation characters rather than one literal phrase, use Remove characters and inspect what happens to words on either side.

Preserve URLs, file names and other literal values

A product rename in prose may also match a path, an API key or a filename. Those values can have a different migration schedule from a display label. For example, the sentence “Open the Draft board” can change while a link ending in /draft-board/ must remain stable. Make the search more specific, work on the relevant section or handle exceptions manually when changing them would break references.

Look at how quotes, spaces and accents are represented in the source. An ordinary apostrophe and a curly apostrophe are different characters. A nonbreaking space can make a phrase look exactly right while preventing an exact match. If the tool misses an expected occurrence, paste the original phrase as it appears instead of typing it again. The invisible character inspector can help locate a difference you cannot see.

Do not try to fix a literal mismatch by normalizing every character in a structured document. Identifiers, quoted examples and user names may require exact spelling. If a change is only needed in one sentence, confine it there. Keep the unchanged original available so you can recover a value without guessing which cleanup operation changed it.

Read the preview without mistaking it for the whole report

The highlighted preview is designed to help you check a sample of the work. It limits how many replacement highlights are shown, while the count can cover more matches. If the text is large, a missing highlight farther down the preview does not necessarily mean no replacement occurred there. Compare the output with the original or take the affected sections into smaller tests.

Check at least the first and last intended change and one occurrence that should remain unchanged. If the count is larger than you expected, inspect for substrings, case variants or repetitions across sections. If it is smaller, inspect punctuation and whitespace and verify that the entire intended source was pasted. Avoid changing several options at once in response to an unexpected count: make a single adjustment and see which examples it changes.

If one search phrase can also appear in its own replacement, avoid blindly repeating the operation on the revised result. A second pass can modify text that was already correct. Keep a note of the search, replacement and settings for each pass. Review a new candidate against the original rather than assuming that the sequence of applied edits is obvious from the final wording alone.

Verify the exact before and after versions before sharing

Open the text diff checker with the saved original and your edited copy. Use line mode to find where changes occurred and word or character mode when a punctuation mark or single letter matters. Verify that the revised text did not inadvertently change a URL, code example or identifier. If the change is for a formal handoff, tell the reviewer both what should change and what should stay untouched.

Read the final sentence in the actual place it will appear. An exact replacement can still leave an article or verb that no longer agrees with the new wording. A receiving application can also change smart punctuation or paste behavior. Those are separate from what happened in the editor and should be checked separately before publication.

Keep the output as a new file or draft until the changes are accepted. For a multi-step review, see the guide to reviewing text changes. It shows how to use the literal replacement, text comparison and counting tools together without confusing a successful mechanical operation with approval of the final text.

Plan several replacements so one pass cannot undo another

A rename from A to B followed by a rename from B to C can unintentionally turn both original values into C. Before applying multiple rules, inspect whether one replacement creates a new match for another rule. If the edits are independent, apply them to separate parts of the source or use a workflow that deliberately distinguishes the original values. Do not test this with the only copy of a long document.

A similar problem occurs when replacing a short phrase contained inside a longer phrase. Search for the longer form first if it has a distinct approved replacement, and verify the remaining short matches after the first pass. Write down the order of the operations. If you need a temporary marker in a controlled edit, choose one that does not already occur in the input and check that none remain after the final pass. Compare the final output with the original rather than reviewing only the last intermediate version. The important question is whether every final value matches its approved destination, not whether each individual step appeared to succeed.