Using Regular Expressions In The Replace Dialog - Visual Studio

Visual Studio 2010¶

Wrapping part of the Find What expression in curly braces allows you to refer to it in the Replace With expression via \number.

Example #1¶

For example, using

Find What	= `Cells$"{[A-Za-z]*}"$`
Replace With	= `Cells(\1.Name)`

will replace	`Cells("uxDefaultCheckboxColumn")`
with	`Cells(uxDefaultCheckboxColumn.Name)`

Example #2¶

To transform SQL from this...

a.City + ', ' + a.State + ' ' + a.ZipCode as CityStateZip

to this...

CityStateZip = a.City + ', ' + a.State + ' ' + a.ZipCode

use these settings in the Find and Replace dialog

Find What	= `,{.+} as {.+}`
Replace With	= `,\2 = \1`

Visual Studio 2012¶

Wrapping part of the Find What expression in parenthesis allows you to refer to it in the Replace With expression via $number.

Example¶

For example, using

Find What	= `Cells$"([A-Za-z]*)"$`
Replace With	= `Cells($1.Name)`

will replace	`Cells("uxDefaultCheckboxColumn")`
with	`Cells(uxDefaultCheckboxColumn.Name)`

Example #2¶

To find all HTML file references that start with "http:", search for (src|href)[ \t]*=[ \t]*["'][ \t]*http:

Note: It's strongly recommended that, after performing the above search, that you search all server code (C# or VB) for "http:".

Changes since VS 2010¶

In Visual Studio 2012, the following changes were made

In the Find what field, capture groups are now wrapped in parenthesis instead of curly braces.
In the Replace with field, capture groups are now referenced via a dollar sign instead of a backslash.

Find What	= `Cells\("{[A-Za-z]*}"\)`
Replace With	= `Cells(\1.Name)`

Find What	= `Cells\("([A-Za-z]*)"\)`
Replace With	= `Cells($1.Name)`