Global Search/Replace with Regexes in VSCode

VSCode is super powerful but if you know how to properly use regexes within global search/replace commands, it can even become more powerful.

The most important ones are:

• Match everything except newlines (.*)
• Match everything including newlines, but don't be greedy (match as few characters as possible): (.|\n)*?

It's easy to remember because the icon to turn on regex search is .*. We just put parantheces around it because then it becomes a variable.

You can then add $n in the replace field, where n is the how-manieth match (e.g. $1)

For example, if you want to change all react imports from "react" to "reaction", you could do this:

• Search: import \{ (.*) \} from "react"; (note the backslashes are needed if you turn on regex for some characters)
• Replace: import { $1 } from "reaction"; (note that the replace field doesn't need backslashes because regex doesn't apply, except for the variables)

If you want to do stuff across newlines, you can use ((.|\n)*?) so it also selects newlines. The outside ( and ) ensure it also becomes a variable.

For example, this will find all while loops, everywhere: while \((.*)\) \{((.|\n)*?)\}

Please note that it is lazy and doesn't take into account nested characters with meaning like { and }. This means it finds what's inside under $2 but if there is also } inside, it will just stop there because that's the end of the regex, no matter what.

I've found these regexes incredibly powerful anyway and I hope you can use it too.