VSCode Regex Search and Replace to Remove Code Block

Question

How can we use VSCode Search and Replace with Regular Expressions to remove a block of code with the pattern

    id: {

      ...

      field: "id"
    },

For example, if we have the following code:

module.exports = sequelize => {
  const attributes = {
    id: {
      type: DataTypes.INTEGER,
      allowNull: false,
      defaultValue: "nextval(foo_id_seq::regclass)",
      comment: null,
      primaryKey: true,
      field: "id"
    },
    count: {
      type: DataTypes.INTEGER,
      allowNull: false,
      defaultValue: null,
      comment: null,
      primaryKey: false,
      field: "count"
    },

after Search and Replace, it should become

module.exports = sequelize => {
  const attributes = {
    count: {
      type: DataTypes.INTEGER,
      allowNull: false,
      defaultValue: null,
      comment: null,
      primaryKey: false,
      field: "count"
    },

Tried using \\t\\t\\tid: {*.? "id"\\n\\t\\t\\t}, \\t\\t\\tid: {*.? "id"\\n\\t\\t\\t}, but it was unable to select anything.

Answer 1

Apparently VSCode does multi-line regexes only when they contain a \\n :

So this should work:

\bid:(\n|.)+(?=count:)

(?=) is a positive lookahead, so it finds everything before "count:".

Answer 2

Search for:

\n\s+id: \{\s+[^}]*field: "id"[^}]*\},

And replace with the empty string.

https://regex101.com/r/rpOnch/1

You do need to escape the { brackets, which is unusual for a regex engine.

To fix your original pattern, you'd need to

• escape the brackets

• replace *.? with .*? if you could let the dot match a newline, but I don't see a way to do that in VSCode, so you probably have to use [\\s\\S]*? (or something similar) instead

Answer 3

You can use the Select By extension.

Search for the block you want based on 2 regular expressions. Selection will be adjusted. Press Delete .