Re: How to grep for a string spanning multiple lines?

[Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com>]

Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl> writes:

> Hi all,
>
> assume I have a file (probably an Org mode one) with some stuff
> I archived from the 'net.  (I'm going to start to sue
> youtube-sub-extractor.el.)  Here is my problem: assume I remember that
> someone in some video said something, and I want to find that part.
> However, it turns out that it is split between two (or more) lines.
>
> Traditional `grep' is not helpful in this situation.  Neither is
> isearch, nor swiper.  One idea would be to convert the subtitles to one
> long line (which is an option), but are there any other ways to search
> for a string spanning more than one line (and not knowing which words
> are separated by a space and which ones by a newline)?
>
> Both Emacs-y and shell-y tools would be appreciated.
>
> TIA,

If your plans are to use regex search & friends in Emacs Lisp, then
matching over multiple lines can be a bit tricky. Out of the box,
without trixing with syntax tables (which I am not familiar with), ".*"
will match only to the end of the line. You can use ".*\\(\n.*\\)*".

I have learned it from the Wiki page:
https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/MultilineRegexp . I don't know if you
are aware of it already or not, hope it helps.