Is there any way to get Visual Studio to perform a regex replace across multiple lines (let the match cross line boundaries)? I know there are many editors I can use for this, but it seems strange that this feature has been left out of Visual Studio. Am I missing something?
7 Answers
Use (.*\n)*? to skip zero or more lines between your expressions.
start(.*\n)*?end
finds
start
two
three
end
? is the non-greedy operator, used to skip as few lines as possible.
If end is not the first word in the line, add .* to match the extra characters. I.e.: start(.*\n)*?.*end finds
start
two
three
four end end
If you only want to replace until the first end, add another non-greedy operator: start(.*\n)*?.*?end.
Historic: In Visual Studio 2017 (and early versions of 2019) you can also use the single line option in the Find and Replace dialog Ctrl-Shift-F like this:
(?s)start.*end
For more see the version history of this answer.
Non-greedy multi-line any character capture, Visual Studio 2013+:
.*?\r?\n.*?
Greedy version in Giles Roberts's answer.
For everyone coming here while searching for VS Code, I use this to match anything from script to anywhere with 2 newlines (newlines excluded):
script(.|\n)+?(?=\n\n)
replace script and \n\n to match everything between them.
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