I'm sorry if this has been covered, but after a long and frustrating afternoon, I'm not yet ready to browse the forum before putting the question, though I will do afterwards...
In regular expression searches, I know that the dot will search for all characters up to a new line, but not beyond.
As the search/replace function is so much faster than macros for repeated operations, it makes sense to pass matched strings to variables, and paste appropriately with the replacement string. This may need to work in paragraphs (blocks) whose line count is uncertain, so I need a wildcard that will match ANYTHING, including a newline (\n).
I have tried several workrounds to overcome this lack (details at end, for anyone interested), and have not succeeded. In the specific case, I did, but I'd have to find something completely new next time the problem arises, probably.
Please can someone tell me if I am just being foolish, or have really found a problem?
And if there is a simple way out, what is it?
I'm using TextPad v4-40, btw.
Here be details.
Workround attempts included using a regexp in a class expression, but that was no good; the first char of the regexp was just used literally.
I also tried nesting regexp's in \( and \), without using that instance of variable assignment in the Replace string. The idea was to try to use \n.* to find a newline and anything that may or may not follow it, all nested in the brackets, and to then treat that bracketing as a single regexp for a following * to find all lines until the next specified term was found. This failed, because the regexp string \(\n.*\) returns an unmatched-bracket error.
I also tried combination of class expressions, and hex byte searches, all to no avail. Even a quick test using \x0D\x0A as a search string failed to find a newline, as it should do.
I tried [[:cntrl:][:print:]] in the hope that as 0D0A (equal to \n) are control characters below value 32, a new line would be matched by the [:cntrl:] and anything else by the [:print:]. It didn't work though.
Basically, as the ONLY way to search for a newline is \n, the task is impossible because if you can't nest regexp's, you also can't use the repetition operator. That would only work on the latest regexp in the pair that is sought, and not the pair, taken as a unit.
A single Total Wildcard, followed by the * (asterisk) repetition operator, would either match till EOF or up to and including some specified term. This small addition would be a welcome one.