Regex to search for a word in a string in Visual Studio

Question

I need to search all of my codebase for \"Url\" and replace it with \"URL\". If I search for Url in Visual Studio I also get all my variables with \"Url\" in it.

Anyone

Answer 1

"Use this (Url):", then you can replace $1 (or whatever syntax Visual Studio uses). You may need to escape the quotes, and I'm not sure if Visual Studio lets you parenthesize parts of the regex.

Answer 2

What I really ended up needing was:

("[^"]*Url[^"]*")

And thanks to the tip from tghw who pointed out the :q shortcut in Visual Studio equates to:

(("[^"]*")|('[^']*'))

I realized I needed to use the first portion to find only the double quoated strings I was looking for.

Both this regex and a standard find with 'Match case' and 'Match whole word' yielded results with some strings I was hoping to not find but eliminated the code with 'Url' in it.

Answer 3

Visual Studio has a "quoted string" operator :q. If you search for :qUrl with 'Use: Regular expressions' and 'Match case' on, it should find all instances of "Url" only in strings.

Update: The above is incorrect. :q just searches for a quoted string, but you can't put anything into it. My testing was just showing cases that looked correct, but were just coincidentally correct. I think instead, you want something like:

^(:q*.*)*(("[^"]*Url[^"]*")|('[^']*Url[^']*'))(:q*.*)*$

Answer 4

If you just quickly want to search for a quoted string you can use the "Use Wildcards" Find Option in Visual Studio.

For example:

"*Url*"

Answer 5

I used the following to search only "whole words" (i mean: appearing with an space before an after or immedately after or before the " ):

(("[^"]*[ ]|")Url([ ][^"]*"|"))

For example this matches "test Url" and "Url test" but don't "testUrl".