About the Word Replacer
A single find and replace box handles one swap at a time, which is painful when a style guide bans a dozen words. Here the second pane holds the rule list: one rule per line, the word to find, a separator, and what to put in its place. Blank lines are ignored and any line starting with a hash is treated as a comment, so you can group rules and annotate them.
Whole words only is on by default and is what makes bulk replacement safe. With it enabled, a rule turning cat into dog leaves catalogue untouched, because the match must not be flanked by another letter or digit. Untick it when you deliberately want to hit fragments, such as renaming a prefix that appears inside longer identifiers.
Rules run in the order you write them, and each one applies to the result of the previous one. That is worth remembering: a rule mapping A to B followed by one mapping B to C will turn your original A into C. Put the more specific rules first when two overlap. Matching ignores case by default and a replacement keeps the exact text you typed, so capitalisation at the start of a sentence may need a fix afterwards. The status line reports how many substitutions happened across how many rules, which is the quickest way to spot a rule that never fired. For a single swap with regex support, Find and Replace is lighter, and Text Cleaner tidies spacing once the swaps are done.
How to use
- Paste the text into the first box.
- Write one rule per line in the second box, for example utilise = use.
- Leave Whole words only ticked so shorter words do not match inside longer ones.
- Check the replacement count in the status line, then copy the result.
Common questions
- What separator should the rules use?
- An equals sign by default. The dropdown also offers an arrow, a comma, a colon, a pipe or a tab if your list already uses one.
- Can I delete a word instead of replacing it?
- Yes. Leave the right hand side empty and the matched word is removed, though you may need to tidy the leftover space.
- Do rules affect each other?
- Yes, they run in order on the running result. Order the specific rules before the general ones when they overlap.
- Why did one of my rules do nothing?
- Usually the word only appears inside a longer word. Untick whole words only, or check the spelling against the source text.