Is it possible to match a pattern using a regular expression across a newline in UltraEdit?

Question

The UltraEdit text editor includes a Perl and Unix compatible regex engine for searching.

I want to be able to match a string line this:

<branch id="attribute">
  <leaf id="attribute"/>
  <leaf id="attribute"/>
  <leaf id="attribute"/>
</branch>

With something like this:

/<branch id="attribute">.*</branch>/gis

Does any one know of a way to accomplish this using UltraEdit?

Answer 1

If you put (?s) at the start of pattern it'll enable single line mode so \r\n will not be excluded from matching .*

E.g., the following matches the whole of the branch element (in UEStudio 6 with Perl style regular expression):

(?s)<branch id="attribute">.*</branch>

Doing a little experiment some other Perl options are supported too. e.g. (?sx-i) at the start would be Single line, ignore eXtra whitespace in pattern, case sensitive (it seems to default to case insensitive).

Answer 2

Have you tried:

/<branch id="attribute">[.\n]*</branch>/gis

Answer 3

If you have perl regular expressions selected, you can do something like:

<branch id="attribute">[\s\S]*</branch>

where \s is any whitespace character, including newline and return and \S is any other character. Note that this is greedy by default, so if you have the following string:

<branch id="attribute">
  <leaf id="attribute"/>
  <leaf id="attribute"/>
  <leaf id="attribute"/>
</branch>
<branch id="attribute">
  <leaf id="attribute"/>
  <leaf id="attribute"/>
  <leaf id="attribute"/>
</branch>

then the one regular expression will find the ENTIRE string as one match. If you don't want to do this, then add ? as follows:

<branch id="attribute">[\s\S]*?</branch>

As you can see from the answers, there are many ways to accomplish this in UltraEdit!

NOTE: Tested with UltraEdit 14.20.