Multi-line regular expressions in Visual Studio - regex

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

Regular expressions have changed in Visual Studio 2013. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/2k3te2cs(v=vs.120).aspx
To match an expression over two lines the code would now be:
StartOfExpression.*\r?\n.*EndOfExpression

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

This works today in Visual Studio 2012:
fooPatternToStart.*(.*\n)+?.*barPatternToEnd
See how the (.*\n)+? part does the match across multiple lines, non-greedy.
fooPatternToStart is some regex pattern on your start line, while barPatternToEnd is your pattern to find on another line below, possibly many lines below...
Example found here.
Simple and effective :)
Note: before VS2012, the pattern that worked was: fooPatternToStart.(.\n)+#.*barPatternToEnd

Answer 4

Note: this answer is using the regex syntax used in Visual Studio up to and including VS 2012. In VS 2013 and later, the regex syntax has changed.
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 5

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

Answer 6

Non-greedy multi-line any character capture, Visual Studio 2013+:
.*?\r?\n.*?
Greedy version in Giles Roberts's answer.

Answer 7

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.