coders » regular expressions

remove all comments from your source code

fschaper — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 16:22:15 +0000

while browsing the logs from this site I found that a lot of people are looking for a way to strip comments from their respective sources in visual studio.

Well here would be the solution for C/C++ sources at least (in visual studio regular expression dialect).

So just fire up your CTRL+H, search and replace dialog and strip away. Maybe you will find it wise to create a copy of your project beforehand in case I missed something.

(/\*(\n|.)@\*/)|(//.*$)

If you are interested in the visual studio specific dialect of regular expressions please have a look at this msdn reference.

identify that potential dangling else

fschaper — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 10:28:04 +0000

For the most part I don’t take part in the religious coding style debate.
I do however try to follow the rule of Abelson and Sussman who say that “Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.”
If you abide by that rule you automatically take a big step towards defensive programming.

Some of my colleagues take a more aesthetic approach to coding and prefer constructs like:

// bad
if( condition )
    do_something;
else
    do_something_else;

in which I see a breach in the guidelines of aforementioned defensive programming because it can lead to a problem known as the dangling else (besides other possible mistakes). To find such problematic sections in my code I use the following regular expression inside the visual studio find dialog:

The expression again for copy/paste:

:b*\([^{]*\n*[^;]*;

delete empty lines in visual studio

fschaper — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 17:02:52 +0000

programmers write a lot of text. better yet, they write structured text. that’s where regular expressions become handy. from time to time there are a lot of repetitive tasks, like deleting hundreds of empty lines out of an source file in VisualStudio 2005.

To get rid of them all press CTRL+H (the default hotkey) to fire up the search+replace dialog. In the find options select Use: Regular expressions as the search method. In the search textfield enter ^$\n and leave the replace with text field empty. Select the scope where search+replace should take place in the “Look in” drop down box. Now, fire away.

As a short hint as to what the expression actually means:
^ = match the beginning of an line
$ = match the end of a line, but not the linefeed character
\n = match the linefeed