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We have a large solution with many projects in it, and throughout the project in forms, messages, etc we have a reference to a company name. For years this company name has been the same, so it wasn't planned for it to change, but now it has.

The application is specific to one state in the US, so localizations/string resource files were never considered or used.

A quick Find All instances of the word pulled up 1309 lines, but we only need to change lines that actually end up being displayed to the user (button text, message text, etc).

Code can be refactored later to make it more readable when we have time to ensure nothing breaks, but for time being we're attempting to find all visible instances and replace them.

Is there any way to easily find these "instances"? Perhaps a type of Regex that can be used in the Find All functionality in Visual Studio to only pull out the word when it's wrapped inside quotes?

Before I go down the rabbit hole of trying to make my job easier and spending far more time than it would have taken to just go line by line, figured I would see if anyone has done something like this before and has a solution.

Brett Allen
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2 Answers2

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The VS regex capability is quite stripped down. It perhaps represents 20% of what can be done with full-powered regular expressions. It won't be sufficient for your needs. For example, one way to solve this quote-delimited problem is to use non-greedy matching, which VS regex does not support.

If I were in your shoes, I would write a perl script or a C# assembly that runs outside of Visual Studio, and simply races through all files (having a particular file extension) and fixes everything. Then reload into Visual Studio, and you are done. Well, if all went well with the regex anway.

Ultimately what you really must watch out for is code like this:

Log.WriteLine("Hello " + m_CompanyName + " There");

In this case, regex will think that "m_CompanyName" appears between two quotes - but it is not what you meant. In this case you need even more sophistication, and I think you'll find the answer with a special .net regular expression extension.

Community
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Brent Arias
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  • Thanks for the article references, and the information that VS regex does not support entire regex. I've actually run across that issue before, but didn't realize it was intentional (rather than my mistake). Good to know! – Brett Allen Sep 09 '11 at 07:23
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You can give this a try. (I hope your code is under source control!)

Foobar{[^"]*"([^"]*"[^"]*")*[^"]*}$

And replace with

NewFoobar\1

Explanation

Foobar the name you are searching for

[^"]*" a workaround for the missing non greedy modifier. [^"] means match anything but " that means this matches anything till the first ".

([^"]*"[^"]*")* To ensure that you are matching only inside quotes. This ensures that there are only complete sets of quotes following.

[^"]* ensures that there is no quote anymore till the end of the line $

{} the curly braces buts all this stuff following your companies name into a capturing group, you can refer to it using \1

stema
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