Multiline Find & Replace in Visual Studio

Can it be done? We're using VS2005 and VS2008 and VS2010.

I don't mean regular expressions - which have their place - but plain old text find & replace. I know we can do it (at a pinch) with regular expressions using the \n tag but prefer not to get tangled up in regex escape characters, plus there's a readability issue.

If it can't be done what plain and simple (free) alternative are people using? That doesn't involve knocking up our own macro.

I finally found it..

No need to download and load any external macro.

Its working in Visual Studio 2008 with in-built macro at least. :)

Steps :
1) Select text you want to find.
2) Press "Alt+F8" or open "Tools -> Macros -> Macro Explorer"
3) Double click "Sample -> Utilities -> FindLine". (It will open Find box with your selection loaded in "Find" field. Don't worry about truncated text shown in "Find" field. Trust me, field has it all..MS way of showing it may be... :) )
4) Click on "Quick Replace" button on "Find And Replace" dialog box. Enter your replace with text.
5) And Click any of 3 buttons as per your requirement...and its done. :)

Hurray.. its working.. May not be a straight forward way to do it but you know with MS.. nothing is straightforward and easy.. :)

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

You might want to take a look at this blog entry:

Multiline Search and Replace in Visual Studio

Provides macro code to escape your search and show the VS find and replace dialog.

You can search for multiline expressions by clicking on the "Use Regular Expressions" checkbox in the "Find and Replace" dialog. Line breaks are then indicated by \n.

I use this: Visual Studio Gallery Multiline Search and Replace