Visual Studio Hacks

Search for Patterns in Your Files #19

Chapter 3, Navigating Visual Studio

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HACK

Basic Expressions

Regular expressions can be very complex, but basic expressions can be easy

to master. Unlike normal searches, regular expressions designate a pattern of

characters to match instead of a constant string. For example, square brack-

ets in a regular expression define a set of characters (a character class).

When you execute the search, it will match any one character out of the set

of characters inside the brackets, so the expression

[abcd] would match a, b,

c, and d—but not z. You can also specify character ranges inside the brack-

ets, so

[a-d] is equivalent to the expression [abcd]. If you need to specify

Figure 3-12. Visual Studio .NET 2003 Find dialog with Regular Expressions enabled

Figure 3-13. Visual Studio 2005 Find and Replace dialog with Regular Expressions

enabled