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, [phone]

Tammy Avery, [phone]

Louisa Avery, [phone]

To use RegExinator, you will need to load this file ...