using (?s) Regex options in Visual Studio Code

Question

I am used to writing regular expressions that support multiple options to specify case sensitivity, white space ignoring, meaning of . etc... In C#, these options are specified with (?i), (?x) and (?s) respectively.

How can these modifiers be used with Visual Studio Code find functionality? I am getting an error

Invalid regular expression: Invalid group.

Example:

q.*?abc.*?q 

will match <q>heheabchihi</q>, but not

<q>hehe
  abchihi</q>

due to the . not matching all characters (\n is omitted). Adding (?s) fixes that in C# regex, but not in Visual Studio Code. What is the Visual Studio Code way of using regex options?

Answer 1

Updated answer

in my original answer, I have overseen the visual studio code requirement, and here I update my answer based on that.

I have made this regex to find the match in Visual Studio Code.

q.*?(.|\n)+?.q

This will find the following:

Tested also here https://regex101.com/r/f3vKcU/1

Inspired by this answer.

Hope that helps.

---

Original answer

You can do something simple as adding [^<>] in your regex.

So change this

q.*?abc.*?q

to

q.[^<>]*?abc.*?q

Will do the job.

Check it https://regex101.com/r/DWQ9ZP/1

I got the inspiration from this answer.

Answer 2

to match new line you can combine regex options RegexOptions.IgnorePatternWhitespace | RegexOptions.Singleline

using System;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;
                    
public class Program
{
    public static void Main()
    {
        string pattern = @"q.*?abc.*?q";
        string input = @"<q>hehe
  abchihi</q>";
        Match m = Regex.Match(input, pattern,  RegexOptions.IgnorePatternWhitespace | RegexOptions.Singleline);
        Console.WriteLine(m);
    }
}

Answer 3

you could match any character or newline like this:

<q>[\s\S\n]*<\/q>

this would select everything inside the q tag until it is closed

i used [\s\S] to select every other character aside \n, it would translate to every whitespace-character and every non-whitespace-character

---

added note: since * is a quantifier for 0 or more, the ? becomes unnecessary

Answer 4

(<\w+>[\w\s]*<\/\w+>)

For normal languages above finds every <tag>text</tag> doesn't matter how many lines they take

However, if the aim is to use the regex to perform a regex search within VS Code then use below

(<\w+>[\w\s]*\n?<\/\w+>)

Answer 5

Visual Studio Code doesn't support . matching newline.

You can use (.|\n)*?, [\w\W]*? instead of .*? to match multiline characters.

Answer 6

When you want to search for something and create a group for it you should use () For example, this regex searches for s character and captures it into a group :

(s)

or this example searches for myExample strings and captures it into a group:

(myExample)

So you can use the group value in replace textbox, in your case, please search for (i) and replace it with x$1 to understand how it works. (group starts from $1)

for Non-capturing group you should use (?:) , it means that you create a group but you don't want to capture it. in your case search for (i) and replace it with x$1 you will see nothing will be captured.

And when you try to use (?s) it tries to create a Non-capturing group and you will get an Invalid group error because you missed a : character.

For your search you can use q[\s\S\r\n]*abc[\s\S\r\n]*.q

This is a more advanced example for replacing first character with the last character of something : Search for (\w)(\w+)(\w) and replace this with $3$2$1