Searching for text that spans across multiple lines

[HunderlineK]

• VSCode Version: 1.19.1
• OS Version: Windows 10 Pro 64-bit Build 16299

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Add a text (string) that spans across multiple lines

`This is a text that
spans multiple lines`

2. Search for a sub string that spans across multiple lines, e.g. that spans. The editor cannot find the text. This is useful for cases where you are searching for a hardcoded text in your codebase (a footnote, tooltip, etc.)

[weinand]

In other text editors searching for "that spans" would not find anything either.
But there doing a regexp search with "that\sspans" works.

[alexdima]

The OP issue, searching for that spans correctly yields no results.

---

Now, the curious case of that\sspans + regex mode:

Currently, \n must be present explicitly in the search text for our multi-line search mode to kick in.

The fact that a single \s in the search text doesn't bring the search in multiline mode is a duplicate of #9051 . The root cause is that we go into multiline search (where we create a large concatenated string of the entire buffer) only if there is sufficient evidence that the search query is multiline. We don't consider \s as sufficient evidence at this point.