Regular expression replace in Textpad where search term spans multiple lines

Question

Is it possible to do a regular expression search and replace in Textpad where the search term spans multiple lines.

e.g. document contains:

Hello
ab_c
D_EF
12_3
World

I would like to replace everything between "Hello" and "World" with a space.

I have tried searching for the regular expression:

Hello.*World

but this does not match (I assume due to the text spanning across multiple lines).

Answer 1

Since Textpad seems to have only very limited regex support, I only got it done with three replaces:

1. Replace each newline (\n or \r\n) in your text with a unique pattern, e.g. ##NEWLINE##

2. Use the regex (Hello).*(World) and replace the match with \1 \2
   (you can also just use Hello.*World and replace with Hello World)

3. Finally, revert step 1 by replacing all ##NEWLINE## with the actual newline

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I suggest taking a look on Notepad++ which has better regex support, a lot of other features (especially for source code editing), and is open source / free software.