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[mainiac]

I'm trying to do some pretty basic regular expression syntax.  I want to do a very extensive search and replace operation in notepad++ using regular expressions.  But I can't make the darn thing accept a newline as part of the expression.  As far as I can tell  "\n\r" should do what I want but it isn't working in notepad++ or scintilla.  To give an example, I want an expression that would match:

thisisastring
andthisisanother

I think this should just be "thisisastring\n\rthisisanother" but that doesn't seem to work.  Can anybody give me a hand?

Edit: turns out that despite what a bunch of people on the internet implied, notepad++ and scintilla don't support multiline regular expressions. 

So, new topic.  Anybody have any recommendations of good freeware text editors besides notepad++ and scintilla?

[timotheus]

I am really liking http://www.sublimetext.com/. It never expires, though I am going to purchase it.

It has featuers like intelligent new lines, so if I'm making a function:

Code: [Select]

function foo()
{

When I hit enter after the curly bracket, I get this:

Code: [Select]

function foo()
{
    |  <- cursor here
}

It can autocomplete, can Alt + . to close tags, lots of other shortcuts. Supports split view, projects, etc.

[Starver]

I know you've found it won't work anyway, in the packages you're using, but...

"\n\r" should do what I want

Are you sure?  There's a difference between Unix and MS systems, in that the 0x0D 0x0A (IIRC[1]) of DOS-and-onwards systems is CarriageReturn+LineFeed, as opposed to just a single LineFeed character being used in Unix.  But DOS-implemented Perl, for example, will treat "\n" as the two characters, and Unix-implemented Perl will treat it as the one.  I'd expect DOS (and Windows) editors implementing the multiline-capable regexping that you're after to do the same.

(Although I remember microEmacs needing to specific about the two control characters, when I used that in the Early '90s.  That wasn't the same regexp notation, however, so probably doesn't count.  However, if you can get a suitable variant of Emacs and get around to learning all the controlling escape-sequences you need, that might do what you want.  I'll admit that I'm not sure I can remember them all, so you might be on your own if there isn't someone out there currently an Emacs buff.  Or, alternatively, there might be a vi one wanting to drag you into their own little Cabal. )

Also, I believe it should be in the order "\r\n".  Again, ICBW, but it looks more correct at first glance.  Lazy me having been lazily using "\n" alone on all the different platforms I've used recently, knowing that (for my purposes, at least) it does what I want it to do!


[1] Long time since I hex edited them, so I'm very much open to being corrected.

[Virex]

Actually \n works on word, notepad++ and wordpad (as well as many other editors, including emacs IIRC), but not in notepad and some other simple text editors, so that may be why you never noticed a difference.

[ILikePie]

Sed is nice, I use it to clean files up every now and then. There's also a Windows version (along with a bunch of other Unix utilities.).

Also, I'm pretty sure it's "\r\n", but it's been a while since I tried messing with things on Windows.

[eggrock]

gVim

/this\nthat

will find

this
that

[edit] It's vi for Windows and there's a learning curve for vi, assuming you don't know it already

[ILikePie]

Pretty sure there's Vim for Windows too

[Twiggie]

wait, can't you just use a question mark to make the carriage return optional?

[Levi]

BTW, textpad supports multiline regexps. 

[Telgin]

First off, yes, on Windows it should be \r\n, not \n\r.  Assuming Notepad++ doesn't silently translate to/from naked \n, but that seems unlikely.

It's possible Notepad++ just doesn't support escape codes in its regular expressions.  You might be able to get away with replacing \r\n with .. (two dot operators).  That's not semantically perfect, but it might be good enough for your purposes.