Find & Replace It! Presentation

What is Find & Replace It! ?

Summary

Find & Replace It! is a powerful search and replace utility. It allows performing very complex batch replacements inside text files of any size. It supports regular expression syntax and dozens of encodings. It has scripting capabilities which allow transforming on the fly the replacement text for every found string. It even handles batch processing of the encoding of files, as well as of types of end-of-lines.

Have you ever had this one piece of text you wanted to modify in hundreds of files at the same time (like that copyright in your php/jsp/cpp/java file or that URL in your html files)? No more need to open text files one by one to edit them! Find & Replace It! can replace content inside of many text files in just a click. It is even able to filter files according to your wishes, and you don't need to do anything but enter the text to find and the text to replace. It even shows statistics about the number of replacements within each individual file, and counts the number of files to be processed. Others classical features of such a tool like the possibility to save your job, backup modified files, export the replacement report, etc. are of course available.

So far Find & Replace It! is nothing more than a classical search & replace utility like many others on the web. However here are five key points that make the difference with its competitors:

• Handles more than 50 text encodings. If your are stucked with some UTF-8 encoding, some Chinese contents or any others non ASCII encodings, Find & Replace It! is the solution for you. It also handles the different kinds of end-of-line.
• Handles huge files. If you want to process any kind of dump files containing tons of text, like a log of 10 GB, Find & Replace It! will do it for you.
• Provides a regular expression editor. This editor offers tools to easily build regular expressions even if you are a newby.
• Provides a find & replace preview. The preview window gives you an immediate feed-back that makes easy to check the impact of your replacement within any file without modifying its content. This is especially usefull whenever you are searching for a complex expression and you don't want to replace it blindly in many files.
• Makes it possible to dynamically adjust the replacement text. It provides three ways of dynamically adjust the replacement text according to the text found. For instance, it is possible to reuse a fragment of the found expression into the replacement text, do arithmetic operations on found text, insert the path or filename of replaced files, apply conditional operations on the replacement string (JavaScript interface), manipulate dates, etc.

The GUI of Find & Replace It! consists of seven panes that you can arrange in any way you want. You can dock panes side by side, arrange them in tabs, or make them float. Adjust the windows layout to the way you like to work. Find & Replace It! comes with four pre-arrange layouts that can be customized the way you want depending on the size of your screen. You can switch from one layout to another in a simple click.

Read on to discover the main features of Find & Replace It! Alternatively, you can dive into the screenshot gallery for a quick preview of its capabilities. If you want to go deeper and learn more about Find & Replace It!  we suggest that you have a look on the Demos & Tutorials and/or the User Manual (PDF).

Main Features

The list below describes some of the key features of Find & Replace It!:

• Find and replace across many files at once
• Supports regexps
• Supports many text encodings, including Unicode (e.g. UTF-8)
• Preserves line endings while processing files
• Preserves BOM while processing Unicode files
• Allows you to perform dynamic replacements based on found expression captures
• Provides built-in processing function for dynamic replacements (e.g. convert captured expressions to lower case, Base64 encoding, Hex encoding, UTF-8 encoding, etc.)
• Provides a JavaScript like interface to customize replacements on the fly by script processing
• Displays matched expressions reports for file search/replace operations 
• Full featured dynamic preview of matched expressions and replacements
• Can convert text encoding
• Can convert end-of-lines (Windows, Unix, Macintosh, Unicode)
  Detects text encoding and line endings of files
• Provides advanced filtering options for selecting files that need to be processed, including file name filters and file path exclusion filters
• Allows you to load and save expressions to find, replacement definitions, file filters, preview settings, etc.
• Handles huge files (> 10 GB)
• Regular expression editor / tester.
• Fully multi-threaded for fast processing and responsiveness 
• Allows you to cancel long operations
• GUI is totally modular
• Creates backup of changed files if required
• Exports the search and replace reports
• Cross-platform: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux

Supported Platforms

Here is a non-exhaustive list of supported platforms:

• MS Windows:
  • Windows 2000 [not tested]
  • Windows XP
  • Windows Vista
  • Windows 7
• Mac OS X Intel:
  • Mac OS X 10.4
  • Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard"
  • Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard"
• Mac OS X PowerPC:
  • Mac OS X 10.4 [not tested]
  • Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard"
• Linux:
  • Fedora 13 (32-bit)
  • Ubuntu 10.04 (32-bit and 64-bit)
  • Kubuntu 10.04 (32-bit and 64-bit)
  • all recent Linux distributions (32-bit and 64-bit) based on GNOME or KDE desktop [not tested, except for the ones listed above]

NOTES:

• The platforms noted as [not tested] in the list, are platforms on which the software should work but with no warranty. All development tools used in this software are certified on these non-tested platforms but we didn't check by ourself. Most of these platforms are pretty old, that's why there are not actively supported.
• The Linux installer requires the following commands: bzip2, lzma, xdg-mime, xdg-desktop-menu, xdg-icon-resource. If one of them is missing, the installation will stop and you might have to manually remove the installation folder.
• On Linux you must have the libicu42 package installed to run the application.
• All modern 64-bit Linux platforms should be supported. However the only tested platforms are Ubuntu 10.04 64-bit and Kubuntu 10.04 64-bit.