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Chapter 13, Enhancing Visual Studio
#100 Test Regular Expressions in Visual Studio
HACK
that allows you to quickly write and evaluate them. Some wonderful Win-
dows utilities, including Regulator (http://royo.is-a-geek.com/iserializable/
regulator) and Expresso (http://www.codeproject.com/dotnet/expresso.asp), are
available. But both of these tools require you to run a separate application,
and a free add-in called RegExinator lets you write regular expressions and
then run them against the current document in Visual Studio. The add-in is
not as full featured as the standalone Windows utilities, but it can be more
convenient since it is built directly into Visual Studio.
I have a small personal interest in this add-in, as I helped
Peter Wright in the development of this tool.
First, you will need to download and install the add-in from http://www.
visualstudiohacks.com/regexinator.
Evaluate Regular Expressions
The main use for the RegExinator is to evaluate regular expressions directly
inside of Visual Studio. To show an example, let’s say that you have a text
file with names and phone numbers, and you need to retrieve a list of all the
area codes from this text file. This is a perfect example of how to apply regu-
lar expressions. Here is a sample of this file:
James Avery, (513) 555-1212
Tammy Avery, (513) 555-1212
Louisa Avery, (615) 555-1212
To use RegExinator, you will need to load this file ...