In Visual Studio 2010, how do you search for text that is not within a single line comment?

Question

In Visual Studio 2010, how do you search for text that is not within a single line comment? E. G. how to find \"bas\" in:

foo bar bas

but n

Answer 1

In the Visual Studio Find dialog, try using this regular expression (make sure to select Use: Regular expressions in the Find options):

~(//[.:b]*)<bas>

This should find all occurrences of the word bas which are not preceded by //.

Note that the Visual Studio regex syntax is a bit different than the conventional syntax. You can find the reference HERE.

Answer 2

Okay, so I asked this question just so I could refer back to my own answer.

Visual Studio doesn't seem to have the typical look-ahead, look-behind constructs. It does have a similar zero-width negative assertion. The syntax is ~(x) which means the pattern does not match x at this point in the pattern. Using this construct, I came up with this: ^(.~(//))*bas Which works really well, but won't exclude a line where // are the first two characters on the line. A version to fix that is: ^~(//)(.~(//))*bas