Multi-line regular expressions in Visual Studio

Question

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?

Answer 1

You can include \n in the expression. As an example, here is a regex that I use to "clean" auto-generated SQL scripts from anything that is not a stored procedure (it will match text blocks that start with a line containing "Object: " followed by something that is not "StoredProcedure", then matching the following lines up to a line consists of the word "GO"):

/\*+ Object\::b:b~(StoredProcedure)(.*\n)#GO\n

Answer 2

you may need to use \r\n at the end of your expression.