Find and Replace in Files

Find and Replace will find one or many substrings in files and replace them with one or many new substrings.

Find and Replace will search and replace in all selected files. The number of files selected is shown in the dialog.

It will automatically identify file formats. Files encoded in ASCII/Unicode/UTF8 are supported.

Files identified as binary will be ignored, however, the identification of binary files can never be 100% accurate so be careful and do not select any binary files.

The newline character that each processed file uses will be kept. When doing Multiline find/replace the newline inserted will be the same as the file already has.

In the Filename field you will see what the name of the processed file will be. Files will always be saved in the same folder: only Filename can be changed

If multiple files are select you will see a "*" in the Filename field. The "*" represents the original file name plus file extension.
If two files are selected named "MyFile1.txt" and "MyFile2.txt" and the Filename field contains "*_replaced.*" the new Filenames will be "MyFile1_replaced.txt" and "MyFile2_replaced.txt".

In the Save as... dropdown list you can select if the new file should be saved with a different name; or it should keep the original name but as a backup by renaming (adding .bak to it); or if the original file should be deleted.

Text to find

In the field the text part(s) to be replaced is entered.
Exactly how the find will work depends on which find and replace mode is selected (see below).

Text to replace with

This fields contains the text(s) that the identified text part(s) will be replaced with.
Exactly how the replace will work depends on what find and replace mode is selected (see below).

Find and Replace Modes

There are a 4 possible Find and Replace modes:

Find one, Replace with one

Only first line from the Find and Replace fields is used.
It will replace all instances found that match the first line in the 'Text to find' field with the first line in the 'Text to replace with' field.

Find many , Replace with many

Every line in the 'Text to find' field will replace the matching line in the 'Text to replace with' field when doing Find and Replace.
Example: Line 3 in the 'Text to find' field will be replaced with line 3 in the 'Text to replace with' field.

Find Many, Replace with same

If many lines exist in the 'Text to find' field, all of them will be replaced with the first line in the 'Text to replace with' field.

Find and Replace Multiline text

Only 1 find and replace match can be entered, but texts entered in the find and replace fields support Multiline text (ie., can contain newline characters).
You can enter text in the 'Text to find' field that spans multiple lines and if a match is found the entire multiline text entered in the 'Text to replace with' field is inserted.
The newline character the file has when entering a find match is unimportant: the replace text will be inserted using the same newline character that the file already uses.

Options

Find match using RegExp

Finding text using regular expressions is not yet enabled.

Find match using Wildcard

Enable wildcard matching in the find field. * and ? can be used to match text.
Using * at the beginning and end of the find expression can give match that you did not expect so make sure you test so it is correct before overwriting original file.

Ignore case

Ignore case when finding matches

Force UTF8 for ASCII text files

Enable this if you want to use UTF8 encoding for all files identified as ASCII.
File encoding is auto-detected but sometimes it is not possible to accurately detect whether a file is ASCII or UTF8. This options will force the usage of UTF8.

Silent - Show no dialogs

When enabled there will be no confirmation dialogs shown for any match found. "Replace All" is assumed and no error dialog will be shown.
Errors will still be logged to the application log.