How to replace multiple lines in Visual Studio 2008

Question

I need to do a find and replace, where I need to replace 2 lines at time. Does anyone know how to do this in the VS2008 IDE?

To clarify, i want to replace 2 lines with 1 line.

Many thanks

duplicate: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2273434/multiline-find-replace-in-visual-studio — nawfal, Mar 29 '12 at 17:27

score 6 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:19

6

Thanks to František Žiačik for the answer to this one.

To perform a find/replace, replacing multiple lines, you need to switch on regular expressions and use a line break (\n) between your lines, also using (:b*) at the start of each line to handle any tabs or spaces tabs.

So to find:

line one
line two

you would search for ":bline one\n:bline two" (without the quotes)

edited May 23 '17 at 12:19

Community

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answered Jun 25 '10 at 15:48

Iain Hoult

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score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 28 '10 at 19:14

3

Try Multiline Search and Replace macro for Visual Studio.

answered Jun 28 '10 at 19:14

Peter Macej

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 25 '10 at 15:39

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You can activate the 'Use regular expressions' in the find dialog, and use \n to match a newline. In your case, type FirstLine\n:Zs*SecondLine.

:Zs* skips leading blanks on line 2.

For example ,\n:Zs*c matches a comma, newline, any number of blanks, a 'c'.

answered Jun 25 '10 at 15:39

Mau

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instead of :Zs you can use :b which matches tabs, too – tanascius Jun 25 '10 at 15:44

How to replace multiple lines in Visual Studio 2008

3 Answers3