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Search and Replace

Webopedia Staff
Last Updated May 24, 2021 7:54 am
A feature supported by most word processors that lets you replace a character string (a series of characters) with another string wherever the first string appears in the document. Most word processors have two search and replace modes. In the first mode, the word processor automatically makes all the replacements in the file. In the second mode, the word processor requires you to approve each replacement. This is safer because you may not want to make the change everywhere.

Search and replace is sometimes called find and replace.