Replace with a newline

Question

Geany, like many text editors, has a replace dialog:

In the Replace with: field, how can I express that I want the pattern to get replaced with a new line character?

score 21 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 29 '20 at 19:29

21

edited Jun 29 '20 at 19:29

Peter Mortensen

answered Aug 25 '15 at 06:06

DavidPostill

1

Note: if you have literal "\n" strings in a file and need them replaced with newlines, first do a non-regex replace of "\n" with something like "ThisIsANewLine", and then do the regex replace of "ThisIsANewLine" with "\n" – SteveDonie Oct 13 '15 at 14:47
3

@SteveDonie If you have a literal "\\n" to replace it is easier to just escape the "\" using "\\n" – DavidPostill Oct 13 '15 at 14:51

jacknad · Answer 2 · 2020-06-30T14:20:36.943

1

The selected answer did not work for me. What did work was checking 'Use escape sequences,' then using the '\n' in the replace field.

This was using Geany 0.21 which did not have "Use multi-line matching."

After updating Geany to 1.30.1 which does have "Use multi-line matching" the selected answer should work.

edited Jun 30 '20 at 14:20

answered Jun 05 '20 at 14:33

jacknad

What version and platform? Both methods worked for me (Geany 1.36 (2020-03-22) on [Ubuntu MATE 20.04](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_MATE#Releases) (Focal Fossa) base with [Cinnamon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinnamon_(desktop_environment))). – Peter Mortensen Jun 29 '20 at 19:53
Can you [add it](https://superuser.com/posts/1558182/edit) to the answer (***without*** "Edit:", "Update:", or similar)? – Peter Mortensen Jun 29 '20 at 21:42

2 Answers2