Find and Replace functions in software such as Word and Notepad are very useful when replacing a large number of textual items with different text. Particular packages such as Word also allow more advanced find and replace using wildcards. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Find and replace becomes most powerful when used in conjunction with regular expressions. Regular expressions allow you to identify strings by constructing an expression. This is a format of pattern matching, meaning that you provide a pattern in an expression and the computer can then identify strings of text which match that pattern. Regular expressions are extremely useful, and can be used to identify patterns of almost any string you can imagine. For more information on regular expressions, check en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression . Additionally, a very good free find and replace utility which implements regular expressions is TextCrawler, available from: www.digitalvolcano.co.uk/textcrawler.html . I recently used regular expressions and TextCrawler to remove garbage text from a text file during the migration of data between databases and found it to be an excellent utility.