Visual Studio Hacks

Search for Patterns in Your Files #19

Chapter 3, Navigating Visual Studio

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HACK

In the Replace expression, you can access these buffers with a backslash.

Thus, if you create a Replace expression of

indicator\1, you will change any

text reading “var1” to “indicator1”. If you had a list of variables like this:

var1

var2

var3

they would be converted into:

indicator1

indicator2

indicator3

You may, of course, create as many tagged expressions as you wish. You can

also access the entire string that the regular expression matched with

\0.

Advanced Patterns

Basic expressions can take you a long way, but there are a number of more

advanced operators that you can use with regular expressions to perform

even more finely targeted searches.

Shortcuts. Several shortcuts for various character sets are built into the regu-

lar expression framework so that you do not have to constantly specify sets

for commonly used groups. For example,

:c matches one alphabetic charac-

ter—it is the same as specifying

[a-zA-Z]. Table 3-1 shows a few of the more

useful character sets.

Positional characters. Several characters in regular expressions indicate that a

portion of the regular expression needs to occur at a specific place in the text

being matched. For example, ^ indicates the beginning of a line. So in the

expression

^a, the a must occur as the first character in a line for the expres-

sion to match, including whitespace characters ...