"Dot matches all" in the "Find/Replace in Files" dialog

[erik.holley]

I'm happy to see that "Dot matches all" has made it into the Find/Replace dialog. I've been using Oxygen since 7.0 and have wanted all along. But, I really don't have much use for it as it is. I have around 100 files that need certain elements removed or commented out and "Dot matches all" is not in the Find/Replace in Files dialog.

Please add this crucial feature to the Find/Replace in Files dialog. We use regex for automation and multi-file automation is where it's needed most.

[adrian]

Hello,

Dot matches all has only become useful in the Find/Replace in Files dialog starting with v14.0 when multi-line search was introduced for Find/Replace in Files.
The reason we have not introduced this option (Dot matches all) is that this makes greedy expressions even greedier and this impacts performance and memory usage significantly.

Note however that there is a simple workaround (for v14.0 and later), you can specify the (?s) flag in the regular expression.
e.g. (?s).* is the equivalent of .* with Dot matches all enabled.

I've logged your feature request to our issue tracking tool. This will be analyzed and if found appropriate, it will be implemented in a future version of Oxygen.

Regards,
Adrian

[erik.holley]

Note however that there is a simple workaround (for v14.0 and later), you can specify the (?s) flag in the regular expression.
e.g. (?s).* is the equivalent of .* with Dot matches all enabled.

Thanks. I'll give this a try. As for the processing and extra memory required for an authentic "Dot matches all". I get it. But, with an i7/16GB RAM, it would likely save me 30 minutes just to run the query over my document base than to write up the same function in Objective-C. I'd be happy to stretch my legs for a few minutes.