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, b

Answer 1

Use the replace in files dialog Ctrl-Shift-H and the single line option (?s):

(?s)start.*end

finds

start
two
three
end

Singleline means: each file is treated as single line, dot . matches newline \n. Downside: you must use Find All and replace all, or replace by hand. Find next does not work.

For the non-modal dialog Ctrl-H and find next, use (.*\n)* to match any number of lines:

start(.*\n)*.*end

Either way, you can replace your findings with multiple lines by inserting \n.