Comments on: Visual Studio Find (and Replace) Regular Expressions

By: Branko Veljovic

Branko Veljovic — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 23:29:34 +0000

If you were to write "find and replace" basic/crystal "formula". How would you do it. I am working in crystal reports and i want to set up about 130 find/replace for differennt abreviations.

For example:

if you find "REAMER" (anywhere in the assigned collumn) replace it with "RMR" AND
IF .......... AND
140 more of these.

NO case sensitive search but upper case replacment) !

THANKS,

branko22@gmail.com

By: aaron

aaron — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 23:29:34 +0000

Do you ever have one of those moments where you feel like a complete moron? No? Well I do! Now is one of those times. Thank you for pointing that out! I can’t BELIEVE I missed that — I went back and looked and it’s even on the MSDN reference page. Geez.

I feel a little better, though, because the PowerShell script worked out better for me in the end (whew!).

Thanks again!!!!

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 23:29:34 +0000

Hi,

Based on the documentation in VS2005:
* and + are greedy, but
@ and # are their lazy equivalents

(I found these and more by clicking on the dropdown to the right of the text box and clicking on 'Complete Character List' )

Sounds like I found this too late for you though.

By: aaron

aaron — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 23:29:34 +0000

I had seen that, and other search/replace tools (I technically didn’t even need Visual Studio, I was just using the sledge hammer to pound in a tack ).

I ended up writing a PowerShell script, which worked out much better in the long run because I was able to automate much of the process (which involved several similar search/replaces, etc.)

Thanks!

By: Jeff Moser

Jeff Moser — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 23:29:34 +0000

If it were me, I’d download something like http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/SearcherAddIn.asp

And then be able to use the System.Text.RegularExpressions version which make sense to me since I use them so much.