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Visual Studio Hacks
book

Visual Studio Hacks

by James Avery
March 2005
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
304 pages
19h 23m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Visual Studio Hacks
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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 ...
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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596008473Errata Page