Plain text or regex mode — which should I use?

Plain for literal strings (it treats . and * as themselves); regex when you need patterns, anchors or capture groups. The match counter is the fastest way to sanity-check that the pattern hits exactly what you expect.

Why does case-insensitive matching still surprise me?

Because it also matches variants you did not intend — "ID", "id" and "Id" all match "id". Use it deliberately, and check the counter before pasting the result anywhere.

Can I reference the matched text in the replacement?

In regex mode, capture groups in the pattern can be reused in the replacement (e.g. reordering "Last, First" to "First Last"). Plain mode replaces with a literal string only.

Batch text replacer — Guide

Find and replace text with plain or regular-expression matching, optional case-insensitive mode and a match counter.

What it is and when to use it

Batch find-and-replace with plain or regular-expression matching, optional case-insensitivity and a match counter so you know exactly how many substitutions happened. For renaming repeated tokens across a config, normalising log lines, or any edit that would take fifty manual replaces.

Find and replace across text in bulk, with regex and case-insensitive support — handy for logs, SQL and config fragments.

How to use it

Paste the original text into the source field
Enter what to find and what to replace it with (leaving it empty deletes the matches)
Tick "use regular expression" for regex; tick "ignore case" for case-insensitive matching
Check the replacement count first to confirm the number of hits, then copy the result

A worked example

Fill in sample text

name=Alice; name=Bob; name=Carol

Copy this into the tool, or open Batch text replacer

Things that trip people up

An invalid pattern makes the page report an invalid regular expression rather than producing a wrong result
Without regex mode, symbols such as . * ( ) in the search field are treated as literal characters
$1 and $& in the replacement text are not treated as capture group references and are written literally

Questions people ask

Plain text or regex mode — which should I use?: Plain for literal strings (it treats . and * as themselves); regex when you need patterns, anchors or capture groups. The match counter is the fastest way to sanity-check that the pattern hits exactly what you expect.
Why does case-insensitive matching still surprise me?: Because it also matches variants you did not intend — "ID", "id" and "Id" all match "id". Use it deliberately, and check the counter before pasting the result anywhere.
Can I reference the matched text in the replacement?: In regex mode, capture groups in the pattern can be reused in the replacement (e.g. reordering "Last, First" to "First Last"). Plain mode replaces with a literal string only.

Next steps

Open the Batch text replacer tool

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