Visual Studio Hacks

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Chapter 3, Navigating Visual Studio

#19 Search for Patterns in Your Files

HACK

more than one range, simply add it to the first, so [a-z0-9] will match any

letter or number. Regular expression characters in Visual Studio are not case

sensitive unless you select the Match Case option in the Find dialog. This is

a departure from most other regular expression syntax.

Normal alphabetic characters outside of special expressions match charac-

ters literally, similar to a normal Find, but can be combined with regular

expressions to make them more flexible. This means that combining the set

match with a literal match gives us a pattern such as

var[12], which will

match

var1 and var2 but not var3.

If you want to match the string var[12], you’d need to

escape the special characters, as in

var\[12\].

Matching quantities. Matching a single character isn’t particularly useful, so

you want to be able to specify a quantity. You can either specify an exact

number of times with the pattern

^n, where n is the number of matches you

are seeking, or use

*, which will match 0 or more repetitions of the pattern.

Thus,

[abcd]* would match ababcd, a, or an empty string, but not abzd.If

you want to be sure that there is at least one match, you can use the

+ char-

acter, which matches one or more repetitions of the pattern.

Preventing matches. Sometimes preventing a match is the desired behavior.

The pattern

bool~(ean) uses the