A Developer's Guide to the Find and Replace Tool

The Find and Replace tool is a powerful utility for making bulk changes to a block of text. It goes beyond simple text replacement by offering full support for regular expressions, case sensitivity, and global matching.

Features

Standard & Regex Modes:
- Standard Mode: Find a literal string and replace it.
- Regex Mode: Use the full power of regular expressions to find complex patterns and use capture groups in your replacement string.
Match Controls:
- Global: Choose to replace only the first occurrence or all occurrences of your pattern.
- Case Sensitive: Toggle whether the search should match case or be case-insensitive.
Live Preview: As you type your find pattern, all matching instances in the source text are highlighted in real-time, so you can see exactly what will be replaced before you commit.
Match Count: An instant counter shows you how many matches were found for your current pattern.
Error Handling: If you enter an invalid regular expression, the tool will immediately display an error message, helping you to correct it.
Two-Step Process: The tool separates the preview from the action. You can see the result first, and then click "Apply Replacement" to commit the change to your source text.

How to Use

Enter Source Text: Paste the text you want to modify into the "Source & Preview" text area.
Define Find & Replace:
- In the Find input, type the text or regular expression you want to search for.
- In the Replace input, type the text you want to substitute. For regex mode, you can use capture groups like $1, $2, etc.
Set Options: Use the switches to toggle Regex Mode, Global replacement, and Case Sensitive matching.
Preview Changes: Look at the highlighted text in the source preview and the final version in the "Result" text area.
Apply: Click the Apply Replacement button to make the changes permanent in the source editor, or click Copy Result to grab the modified text without changing the original input.