Multiline regular expression search in Visual Studio Code

Question

Multiline regular expression search doesn't work in VS Code version 1.27.2 .

Theoretically aaa(\n|.)*bbb should find string starting from aaa and ending bbb but it doesn't work. The solution mentioned here Multi-line regular expressions in Visual Studio Code doesn't work as well.

Answer 1

Multiline search is added in v1.29 released in November 2018. See multi-line search.

VS Code now supports multiline search! Same as in the editor, a regex search executes in multiline mode only if it contains a \n literal. The Search view shows a hint next to each multiline match, with the number of additional match lines.

This feature is possible thanks to the work done in the ripgrep tool to implement multiline search.

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Multiline search is coming to the Find Widget with v1.38. See multiline find "pre-release" notes.

Multi Line search in Find Widget

The Find Widget now supports multiple line text search and replace. By pressing Ctrl+Enter, you can insert new lines into the input box.

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Odd that it is Ctrl+Enter in the Find Widget but Shift+Enter in the Search Panel (see Deepu's answer below). Shift+Enter has other functionality when the Find Widget is focused.

Answer 2

yes, you could use regex for mutliple line search in VScode.

To find a multi-line text block starting from aaa and ending with the first bbb (lazy qualifier)

aaa(.|\n)+?bbb

To find a multi-line text block starting from aaa and ending with the last bbb. (greedy qualifier)

aaa(.|\n)+bbb

Answer 3

I have been looking for a quick way to do this, and I have come to the following:

start_text.*?(.|[\n])*?end_text

with start_text and end_text being the bounds of your multiline search.

breaking down the regex ".?(.|[\n])?":

1. ".?" will match any characters from your start text to the end of the line. The "?" is there to ensure that if your end_text is on the same line the . wont just keep going to the end of the line regardless (greedy vs lazy matching)
2. "(.|[\n])" means either a character\whitespace or a new line
3. "*?" specifies to match 0 or more of the expression in the parentheses without being greedy.

Examples:

• <meta.*?(.|[\n])*?/> will match from the beginning of all meta tags to the end of the respective tags
• <script.*?(.|[\n])*?</script> will match from the beginning of all script tags to the respective closing tags

Warning:

Using .*?(.|[\n])*? with improperly or partially filled in start_text or end_text might crash VS Code. I suggest either writing the whole expression out (which doesn't cause a problem) or writing the start and end text before pasting in the regex. In any case, when I tried to delete parts of the starting and ending text VS Code froze and forced me to reload the file. That being said, I honestly could not find something that worked better in VS Code.