Google Apps For Education Support site

26 Mar 2009

Find and Replace in Google Docs

Google Docs finally replaced the partially functional “find & replace” dialog inherited from Writely with an inline bar that actually works. Just select “Find & replace” from the “Edit” menu or type Ctrl+F to make the bar visible. To find the next match, click on “Find next” or type Ctrl+G.

The option can be used to find a text in your document and to replace it with a different text. If you click on the small arrow next to the first input box, you’ll be able to set some restrictions: case matching, finding only whole words or using JavaScript-style regular expressions. For example, to remove all the email addresses from a document, use the following regular expression for email addresses:

[a-zA-Z0-9]+[a-zA-Z0-9._%-]*@(?:[a-zA-Z0-9-]+\.)+[a-zA-Z]{2,}

If you know some other potentially useful regular expressions in a word processor, share them in the comments.

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