Search stops working for “Entire Solution”

Question

Somehow Visual Studio search has stopped working for me. Anytime I search \"Entire Solution\" for some text I get this result:

Find all \"[Whatever I

Answer 1

Probably won't apply to most situations, but what fixed it for me was turning off 'Use Regular Expressions' in the search window. I had previously been using Regular Expressions for some tricky replacements and didn't turn off when finished. I think perhaps it was interpreting part of simple replace text (see below - had some special characters) as the start of an incomplete or malformed regular expression, and so couldn't actually do any matching. Would be nice if it told you!