Question

In xCode I want to look for my NSLog statements that are not prefaced by a { from the previous line.

So I want to not find:

if (debug) {
    NSLog(@"MyDebug");
}

and only find.

  x=y+3;
  NSLog(@"MyDebug %d",x);

I was thinking something like : (?<!\{\r.*NSLog).*NSLog or (?<!\{)\r.*NSLog(?!\{) though that does not seem to get me anything.

Answer 1

As Jeremy mentioned in the comments, Xcode doesn’t support regexes that match multiple lines. However, according to this message in a thread on xcode-users, you can search for newline characters using non-regex search:

Xcode’s Find and Project Find don’t support multiline regular
expressions. They do support multiline text find…

(A subsequent message in the thread indicates that you can type a newline using option–return.)

If you know the line above the one you wish to match will always end with ;, you could leverage that in a non-regex search.

As for grep, unfortunately it doesn’t really like to match multiple lines. pcregrep may be more useful.