March 17, 2012

Find and Replace with line breaks in Eclipse

Often with doing a find and replace you want to use line breaks in the find (or replace) criteria. Sometimes I’ll have a column of data from a csv that I want to modify…whatever.

You can now check the “regular expressions” checkbox while doing a file search in Eclipse and specify “\R” to find or replace line breaks (platform independent).

Eg replace line breaks with commas:

Other interesting and useful options are:

  • \t - tabs
  • \n - newline
  • \R - platform indepedent line delimiter
  • \r - carriage return
  • ^ - line start

This was introduced in Eclipse 3.4.x, read more here.

© Michael Sharman 2017