Possible to make .* match line breaks (Replace in path)

Just add a question mark after the star to toggle it to be non-greedy:

Search: <div id="id">([\s\S]*?)</div>

Replace: <span>\1</span>

PhpStorm's regex support seems a bit limited; usually, for complex searches or replaces, I open the file in BBEdit, which I can easily do with an external script command that I set up in PhpStorm.

The bit you're missing is getting . to match newline characters. I'm not sure how this is controlled in Java's regex engine (which I believe is what PhpStorm uses), but in PCRE, this is controlled via the s pattern modifier. Looking at the help docs in PhpStorm, I see no reference to this modifier, nor any other, for that matter.

That said... It appears that PhpStorm can search across multiple lines just fine, which is a signficant limitation that some editors suffer from. In particular, I did a quick experiment and *was* able to get a multi-line pattern to work by using something other than the . character to do the match. For example, in the case of your example, this pattern works:

<div id="id">[\s\S]*</div>

Instead of looking for a . match (which won't match newlines without the appropriate pattern modifier), it looks for any character that is a whitespace character or non-whitespace character (which effectively means anything). I also did a test-replace wherein I found your sample div and replaced it with a span that had the same content. That is, these patterns:

Search: <div id="id">([\s\S]*)</div>

Replace: <span>\1</span>

Hope that helps.

I landed here after a search to work out how to make the "." in a regex match newlines.

However then solved my problem using this which will match all chars including newlines:

(?:.|\n)*

Thought this was maybe worth recording here.

As the docs say:

PhpStorm supports all the standard regular expressions syntax

This means you can use modifiers such as `(?s)` a the start of the expression which:

makes the dot match all characters, including line breaks

FYI, IntelliJ is the same.

So your expression would become:

(?s)<div id="id">.*</div>

Ok, it's $1 not \1.

This answer is very close! Unfortunately it's being greedy. Do you happen to know if there is another modifier to change that?

You have saved my day!

Thanks for sharing!!!

I tried the replace and it did not work. It populated the contents of the <span></span with a 1:

<span>1</span>