Visual Studio Hacks

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Chapter 3, Navigating Visual Studio

#19 Search for Patterns in Your Files

HACK

HACK

#19

Search for Patterns in Your Files Hack #19

Unleash the power of regular expressions to make everyday searches and

Find and Replace operations more powerful.

Regular expressions are an extremely versatile text-matching language that

gives you incredible power when searching your documents and when used

with replace operations, can greatly assist with repetitive changes to blocks

of code.

Searching

The basic regular expression search is easily done. You simply open the Find

dialog through the Edit

➝ Find and Replace ➝ Find menu or with Ctrl-F

(Edit.Find). Enable regular expression searching by ensuring the Use check-

box is selected and the drop-down list has Regular Expressions selected, as

shown in Figure 3-12.

In Visual Studio 2005, the Find dialog has changed. To enable regular

expressions searching, you will need to expand the Find Options section of

the dialog. Figure 3-13 shows the new Find dialog with the Options section

expanded.

Enter your regular expression into the Find What text box and click on Find

Next. The next match of your expression will be found in the document. As

with normal matches, clicking Find Next again will find the next match. The

next step is to learn the regular expression (also known as regex or regexp)

syntax. Searching will never be the same.

Figure 3-11. Incremental search