Bulk Edit Checklist
A find-and-replace across a whole document is not reversible once you have pasted the result somewhere. Two minutes here saves the alternative.
BFCBrilliance · bfcbrilliance.com/tools/find-and-replace
How this behaves
- Matching
- LITERAL — a dot is a dot
- Not
- a regular expression
- Why not
- a hostile pattern could hang YOUR browser
- Scope
- EVERY occurrence, always
- Case
- SENSITIVE — Cat ≠ cat
- Empty replacement
- DELETES every occurrence
- Empty search
- does nothing, deliberately
- Check it worked
- compare characters before and after
- ⚠ Chained replacements
- A→B then B→C turns As into Cs
- ⚠ Fix for that
- a placeholder that appears nowhere else
Plan the replacements before running any of them
| # | Find | Replace with | Expected count | Interferes with? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Before pasting the result back
- Original saved somewhere — this is not reversible
- Search string checked for being too broad
- Character counts compared — did anything actually match?
- Result read, not just the counts
- Case considered: does the other capitalisation need it too?
- Chained replacements checked for interference
- Placeholder used if one replacement feeds another
- Blank lines tidied if you deleted whole entries
A search that matched nothing looks like success
The page returns a result either way. Compare the character counts before and after: if they are identical, either nothing matched or your replacement is the same length. That check takes a second and is the difference between a bulk edit that worked and one you find out about later.
Chained replacements interfere
Replace A with B, then B with C, and your original As are now Cs as well. It is easy to miss because each individual step is correct. If any replacement could produce text a later one searches for, route it through a placeholder that appears nowhere else in the document.