How to Find and Replace Text in a List Online
A word processor's find-and-replace works fine for a document, but a plain list of hundreds of lines - IDs, URLs, exported data - needs the same substitution applied consistently across every line at once, usually with more precision than a basic text editor offers.
Quick answer
To find and replace text in a list, paste the text into a find-and-replace tool, type what to find and what to replace it with, and the result updates live. Choose Literal for exact text matches, Whole Word to avoid matching inside other words, or Regex for pattern-based replacement with capture groups - and chain multiple substitutions together if you need more than one change.
Try it on your text
Open Find & Replace →Three matching modes
- Literal - matches your exact text anywhere it appears, including as part of a longer word. Searching "cat" matches "cat", "catch", and "concatenate".
- Whole Word - only matches complete words. Searching "cat" with this on matches only standalone "cat", not "catch" or "concatenate".
- Regex - full pattern matching,
including capture groups for rearranging text (
$1,$2, etc.).
Chaining multiple replacements
Real cleanup jobs rarely need just one substitution. Click + Add Find-Replace to stack up to 8 pairs - each one runs on the result of the one before it, so you can strip one pattern, then reformat what's left, then fix a second issue, all in a single pass. Each pair gets its own highlight color in the output so you can trace exactly which rule changed what.
Using capture groups to rearrange text
Regex mode supports capture groups for reshaping text, not just substituting it. Wrap the parts you want to keep in parentheses in the Find pattern, then reference them by number in Replace:
Find: (\w+)@(\w+) · Replace: $2/$1
john@example mary@acme
Output
example/john acme/mary
Need to remove whole lines, not just parts of them?
Filter Lines keeps or removes entire lines based on a pattern.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I find and replace text across a whole list at once?
What's the difference between Literal, Whole Word, and Regex modes?
How do I delete text instead of replacing it with something else?
Can I make more than one substitution at once?
Can I use capture groups to rearrange parts of the text?
(\w+)@(\w+) and replacing with $2/$1 turns "john@example" into "example/john".