FoxReplace is a Firefox addon that is able to replace text in a web page, in both editing and reading mode, with or without regular expression (regex), both manually and automatically. We use it as a complement to Find and Replace which we reviewed last month because among both, only FoxReplace can do text replacing on Blogspot post editor. We need FoxReplace more because as you might have noticed already, this site --The Ubuntu Buzz-- is based on Blogspot. We hope this tutorial will help all other professional authors. Now let's start exercising like always!   

Subscribe to UbuntuBuzz Telegram Channel to get article updates.

How To Install FoxReplace

On Ubuntu version 24.04 with Mozilla Firefox version 143 and addon version 2.6.2:  

1. Go to Mozilla Addons Org website.

2. Search for "foxreplace".

3. Select and install FoxReplace by Marc licensed under GNU GPL v3.

 (FoxReplace official webpage at Addons Mozilla Org (aka AMO) website)

If you don't have an idea on these, please refer to our tutorial on installing a Firefox addon. 

**** 

Basic Replacing a Text

We practice this on Blogspot (aka Blogger) post editor. Just like the last article, we copy Debian 13 "Trixie" announcement text here as sample text. We will replace the word "Debian" with "GNU/Linux" to see if it works.

1. Prepare sample text on Blogger text editor, for both title and content. See picture below:

2. Find the word "Debian" by pressing Ctrl+F then typing "debian" followed by ticking "Highlight All" option next to it. 

3. All occurrences of the word "Debian" will be colored pink/magenta.

(Before replacing: original text says Debian as the name of project and system)

4. Click FoxReplace button ->  Replace -> right sidebar will show "FoxReplace". 

5. Type "Debian" into Replace and type "GNU/Linux" into With. 

6. Click Replace. 

7. All old text now replaced with new text, in both title and contents. It works! Done. 

(After replacing: now GNU/Linux replaces Debian)

****

Fun Text Replacing on Your Favorite Webpages 

One among purposes of FoxReplace is to do text replacements for fun. What does it mean? This means you can replace any text within your favorite website pages. This does no harm, because the changes only happen on your computer. As an example, let's try to apply the above exercise into Debian official webpage:

1. Visit Debian Trixie Announcement. 

2. Do the above replacement. 

3. All "Debian" will turn "GNU/Linux" on the entire webpages.

(Automatic text substitution happens on The Debian Project front webpage)

4. You can make substitution like this applied to all other websites by going to Options -> Add -> Substitutions -> fill in like the above to the table -> tick check mark to Apply automatic substitution on page load -> Save.

(Options page of FoxReplace showing an entry of our example substitution above)

5. Imagine fun things you can do with step 1 to 4 to any of your favorite websites. 

**** 

Advanced Text Replacing with Regex 

We present you here an example of advanced text replacing using regular expression (regex). We will automatically remove all numbers, one digit or more, followed by a period and a white space, in the beginning of every line. Think about it if you have a very long list of names with number while you want just the text list and not the numbers.

1. Copy a short numbered list below into Blogger post editor:

1. Apache 2.4.64
2. Bash 5.2.37
3. BIND DNS Server 9.20
4. Cryptsetup 2.7
5. curl/libcurl 8.14.1
6. Emacs 30.1
7. Exim (default email server) 4.98
8. GNUcash 5.10
9. GNU Compiler Collection 14.2
10. GIMP 3.0.4 

2. Open FoxReplace sidebar.

(Before replacing: a sample text) 

3. Type "^[0-9]+\.." correctly without quotes into Replace.

4. Click Text option and select Regular Expression. 

5. Empty the With input box. 

6. Click Replace. 

7. All occurrences of number in beginning of every line will disappear. Wonderful! Done.  

(After replacing: resulting text is now clear from unnecessary line numbers) 

**** 

About FoxReplace 

 ****

See Also

1. Find and Replace Addon: How to use it on Firefox

2. Edit document using LibreOffice Writer with regex (2020) 

3. Learn GNU sed command lines with regex (2016)

4. Edit text using KDE Kate with regex text substitution (2015) 

**** 

References 

1. What is regular expression (regex)? By Wikipedia 

2. Official FoxReplace FAQ with beneficial resources about regex 

This article is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.