Best 3 Text Line Filter Tools Compared

A 4,000-line log and you want the twelve lines that say ERROR. Or an export where every third line is a header repeated by whatever produced it, and you need them gone.

On a Unix machine this is grep -v and takes four seconds. Everywhere else — a Windows laptop, a locked-down work machine, a phone, or a text file you have already pasted into a browser — it is a surprisingly annoying task, which is why a small industry of line filter tools exists. They differ in whether they can do regex, whether they can invert the filter, and whether your log leaves the machine.

How to judge a line filter

Can it keep as well as remove? Extracting the matching lines and deleting them are the same operation inverted. A tool offering only one makes you work around it.

Does it support regex? Plain substring matching handles most cases. Regex handles timestamps, numbers and word boundaries, and turns a two-pass job into one.

Whole-word matching? Without it, filtering id also strips every line containing video or identity.

Where does the text go? Logs contain paths, IPs, tokens and customer identifiers. A tool that uploads them is the wrong tool.

The comparison

Facts checked August 2026; tools change their plans. Table covers only the 3 alternatives — our tool gets its own section below.

MiniWebtool Remove Lines Containing

The most capable matcher. It offers three modes — plain text, whole-word and regular expression — with case sensitivity as a toggle, and lets you choose whether to keep or remove the lines that match. The regex mode supports the things you actually need for logs: digit classes, word boundaries and character classes.

Whole-word matching deserves the callout. Filtering for id without it also removes every line containing video, identity and hidden, which is the classic way a filter quietly destroys data you needed. It shows live statistics as you filter, is free without an account, and has a premium tier from $3.33 a month that removes ads.

Folge Filter Lines

The most privacy-explicit and the most limited. It removes lines containing text or keeps only lines that match, with case-insensitive matching optional and — unusually — position matching, restricting matches to the beginning or end of a line. That is genuinely useful for log formats where the timestamp or level is always at the start.

It states plainly that all processing runs in your browser with no data sent to servers, and results can be copied, downloaded or opened in a new tab. The gap is regex: it filters by one string at a time with no pattern support, so anything requiring a pattern needs a different tool.

MeFancy Remove Lines

The most convenient for files. It supports regex and case-sensitive matching, offers both “remove lines containing” and “remove lines NOT containing” so you can invert the filter, and has a drop-file-to-load feature for pulling in a text file directly rather than pasting a few thousand lines into a textarea.

No account and free, as part of a wider collection of text tools. The page does not say whether processing happens locally or on a server, which for a dropped log file is the one thing you would want stated.

Remove Lines Containing Text

Ours removes every line containing a given word, or keeps only the lines that match, with case and whole-word options. It is the focused version: two modes, two options, no pattern language to get wrong.

What it does not do: regular expressions, file drop, or position matching. For a log where you need to match a timestamp pattern or a numeric range, MiniWebtool’s regex mode is the right tool and ours is not. For the common case — strip the lines mentioning this word, or keep only those — ours has fewer ways to go wrong, and whole-word matching prevents the single most common mistake.

Which one to pick

• Patterns, not just words — MiniWebtool’s regex mode.
• A log file you would rather not upload — Folge, or ours.
• Matching only at the start of each line — Folge’s position matching.
• A word to strip, with whole-word safety — the tool below.

How to do it with Remove Lines Containing Text

1. Open Remove Lines Containing Text and paste the text.
2. Enter the word to match, and turn on whole-word matching unless you specifically want partial matches.
3. Choose whether to remove those lines or keep only those lines.
4. Check the line count before and after — a bigger drop than expected usually means a partial match caught something.

The walkthrough is in how to delete every line containing a word. Other text tools are in the tools directory.

You might also need

Filtering often leaves blank lines and ragged spacing behind. The Whitespace Cleaner tidies that in one pass.

If the same line appears many times over, the Duplicate Line Remover is the more direct tool for that job.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a free tool to remove lines containing a word without uploading my file?

Yes. Folge states all processing runs in your browser with nothing sent to servers, and ours runs locally too. MeFancy does not say either way, which is worth knowing before dropping a log file into it.

How do I keep only the lines that match instead?

Every tool here supports inverting the filter, though they name it differently — “keep lines”, “preserve”, or “remove lines NOT containing”. It is the same operation, and it is what you want when extracting errors rather than hiding them.

Why did my filter remove more lines than expected?

Almost certainly partial matching. Filtering id strips video, identity and hidden too. Turn on whole-word matching, or use a regex with word boundaries.

Final thought

Check the line count before and after every filter. A filter that removed 400 lines when you expected 12 has told you something important, and it is much easier to notice in a count than by scrolling.

Try the free Remove Lines Containing Text tool