Find and replace
Find and replace, with plain text and patterns kept apart — so a search for “3.50” means three point five nought. Nothing you type here leaves your browser. It is worked out on your own device, so there is nothing to send and nothing to log — which matters more for text than for most things, because people paste in work they are not supposed to paste anywhere.
A plain search is not a pattern, and that matters
Search for 3.50 and you mean three point
five nought. Hand that straight to a regular expression, which is what
a surprising number of tools do, and the dot means
any character — so 3x50 and
3050 match too, and nothing on screen tells you the
search was reinterpreted.
| Plain text | 3.50 finds one thing in
“price 3.50 and 3x50 and 3050” |
|---|---|
| As a pattern | the same search finds three |
Here the two are separate settings and the default is plain text. In plain mode every character that means something to a regular expression is escaped first, so a full stop is a full stop and a bracket is a bracket.
And when you do want a pattern
Switch to Regular expression and the search
is used as written. Group references work in the replacement:
(\w+) (\w+) replaced with $2, $1 turns
“John Smith” into “Smith, John”. A pattern
that will not compile is explained rather than swallowed.
An empty search is refused
Not out of fussiness: an empty search matches between every character, so replacing it inserts your replacement everywhere and there is no undo. It is refused with the reason instead.