# Find & Replace It! - Read Me

## What is Find & Replace It! ?

Find & Replace It! is a high-end solution to find files and execute search and replace operations across multiple files. 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.

If you regularly work with text files, if you make websites, or develop software, Find & Replace It! allows you to maintain and transform the contents of your files in a few clicks. Do you have to rename a page in a website and thus need to edit URLs in hundreds of files? Simply select the root directory of your website and indicate the string to replace. Then, the replacement can be made across your entire website in just one click. Do you need to modify files headers in some parts of the source code of your application? Find & Replace It! allows to finely filter the files to be processed or not. It also provides tools to introduce contextual information into your replacement string, for instance: the current date, the name of the file where the replacement is in progress, etc. For each batch-replacement, it provides statistics about the number of replacements within every modified file, and counts the number of processed files. Of course, all classical features of such a tool, like the possibility to save your job, backup modified files, export the replacement report, and much more are available.

So far Find & Replace It! looks like 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 different kinds of text encodings. If you have troubles with any kind of Unicode data like UTF-8 encoded files, any Chinese content, or any other non ASCII contents, Find & Replace It! is the solution for you. It also handles all different kinds of end-of-line.
- Handles huge files. If you want to process any kind of 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 advanced regular expressions even if you are a newbie.
- Provides a preview for found and replaced text. With the preview window you can visualize in one glance what are the strings that match a given expression, what will be the replacement text, and even mix both views. It gives you an immediate feed-back on what is going to change, which makes easy to understand the impact of your replacement within a file without actually modifying its content. Such a realtime visualization is especially useful whenever you want to build a complex expression to search for.
- Makes it possible to dynamically adjust the replacement text. It provides many ways of dynamically adjusting the replacement text according to the context. 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 the name of the processed file, apply conditional operations on the replacement string (JavaScript interface), manipulate dates, etc.

These key features associated to many others makes it one of the most feature rich tool to find and replace regular expressions over multiple files. It's also a powerful tool for converting the text encodings (charsets conversion, including the Byte Order Marks), or the end-of-line delimiters, across multiple files. In addition, it's probably the only software in this category that is portable!

The GUI of Find & Replace It! consists of several panels that you can arrange in any way you want. You can dock panels 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.

The list below describes some of the most important characteristics of Find & Replace It!:

- Find and replace across many files at once
- Execute multiple different replace operations (i.e. ability to run a sequence of several distinct replacements in one shot)
- Supports regular expression syntax
- Allows multi-line searching
- Supports many text encodings, including Unicode (e.g. UTF-8)
- Preserves line endings while processing files
- Preserves BOM while processing Unicode files
- Allows to perform dynamic text 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
- Provides tools for converting text encoding
- Provides tools for converting line endings (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 to load and save expressions to find, replacement definitions and file filters
- Handles huge files (> 10 GB)
- Regular expression editor / tester
- Fully multi-threaded for maximum performance, and great responsiveness
- Allows 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 and Linux

## Supported platforms

For the list of supported platforms, please read the chapter Supported Platforms of the `install.html` document located in this document's directory.

## How to install/uninstall?

Please read `install.html` document located in this document's directory for installation instructions.

## Getting Started

The chapter Getting Started of the user's manual (PDF) describes where to find documentation, and gives you some advices to start on the right foot with Find & Replace It!.

## Where to get support?

For general information, please visit our website at: https://find-and-replace-it.com

If you have any questions about pricing and/or license terms, don't hesitate to write to us at: support[at]find-and-replace-it.com

All support requests regarding Software usage as well as general questions about demo version must be addressed to: support[at]find-and-replace-it.com

Please note that support might be only available to registered customers or users who have a valid license for their software copies. Moreover we kindly request our customers to use the online form for posting support requests. This form is accessible through: https://find-and-replace-it.com/home/support/

## Known issues and limitations

The text-encoding detection uses heuristics that do not always provide accurate results except for all Unicode encodings (i.e.: UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32). Since version 1.0 the charset detection has been greatly improved. Since this version we use the ICU library from IBM. However, the process is partly statistical in nature, and the results can not be guaranteed to always be correct.

For performance reasons the Find & Replace Preview has a content limit of 100'000'000 characters. By default this limit is fixed to 5'000'000 to increase the preview speed. This can be changed through the preferences panel.

For performance reasons it's not possible to search for an expression longer than 50'000'000 characters. By default this limit is fixed to 100'000 to increase speed of strings replacement. This can be changed through the preferences panel.

For the sake of performance, the end-of-line detection reads a maximum of 128 MB of the analysed file.

The file creation date and its other attributes are not preserved when a file is modified by a search and replace operation. For several performance considerations the modified file is actually a new file generated from scratch. The only exceptions are the file permissions on UNIX-like systems, which are restored on the new file. The same limitations apply when converting the encoding of a file.

It is possible to use the application from the command line, however it requires a graphical environment.

The product activation requires an Internet connection. There is no other way to activate your copy of the software.

Unfortunately, Find & Replace It! cannot handle MS Word documents, Pages, PDF or others. It is very powerful to manipulate text files, but is limited to thereto. The binary documents like those of MS Word are usually described in a proprietary format. For example, it is not directly possible to extract the text content of a paragraph from a Word document. Indeed, in this case, the text of the paragraph does not appear in clear text in the contents of the DOC file. To get the plain text one must first process the document. Moreover, these manipulations are extremely complex (formatting, tables, etc.) and such a feature will far exceed the range of a simple utility software.

## Licensing Information

Please read the `licensing-information.html` document located in this document's directory for license terms, third party licenses, and credits.

# Legalities

On Windows, this software is shipped with a precompiled version of the OpenSSL Toolkit. This is required in order to communicate with the license server and some other online services in a secure way (e.g. for obtaining updates notices). The cryptography used through the OpenSSL Toolkit is only used to guarantee the privacy of the data between the application and our servers.

Please remember that export/import and/or use of strong cryptography software, providing cryptography hooks, or even just communicating technical details about cryptography software is illegal in some parts of the world. So when you import this package to your country, re-distribute it from there or even just email technical suggestions or even source patches to the authors or other people you are strongly advised to pay close attention to any laws or regulations which apply to you. The authors of Find & Replace It! are not liable for any violations you make here. So be careful, it is your responsibility.

    Copyright© 2007-2018, dProg - Philippe Docourt