Some pretty cool stuff…
Did you know that SQL Server Management Studio makes a nice little regular expression (regex) editor and tester? Go to find and replace (Ctrl-H) and down at the bottom of the dialog box is a check box names “Use”. Check that box and choose Regular Expression. Now to the right of the box where you type the text, there is a glyph that will fly out a regular expression character helper. You can type in text in Management Studio and test a regular expression against it.
You can also leverage this regular expression functionality to do a multi-line find and replace. You can substitute in the old C# (C++) syntax \n for a new line. I needed to replace a block of text with a multi-line block of text and this worked beautifully!
Don’t forget you can use Management Studio to search in files too. A nice GREP tool too! Hit the glyph just to the right of Quick Replace or Quick Find at the top and you’ll get the option to search in files.
