[gdi1942]

Hi folks, i have a string that contains a collection of visual basic methods, i'm trying to write a regular expression statement that can catch methods that look like this.

		Public Sub btnClear_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles btnClear.Click
			(A Bunch of code lines here)
		End Sub

What I've got so far for a regular expression is

"Public\\sSub\\s(.*)_(.*)\\sHandles\\s(.*)\\.(.*)\\s?\\n(.*\\n)\\s*End\\sSub"

The trouble is it returns no matches and I'm not sure why. Seems regular expressions are meant to function on single line strings. I've tried removing the End Sub portion of the the expression and that works, giving me just the header and it's match groups. I'm coding this in c#. Thanks for any help you can provide.

[JimmySeal]

I just ran that expression through Expresso and it seemed to match that string alright. Regular expressions can certainly be used to match multi-line strings. Try replacing your \ns with [\n\r]+.

I'd also suggest using @ at the beginning of your string (i.e. before the opening quote mark) so that you don't have to use double backslashes. It makes the strings quite a bit more readable.

[gdi1942]

A co-worker of mine helped me resolve the problem. The trick was to use *? on the ,*\\n part wihch means to match as little as possible. The statement now looks like

Public\\sSub\\s(.*)_(.*)\\sHandles\\s(.*)\\.(.*)\\s?\\n((.*\\n)*?)\\s*End\\ sSub"