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RegEx

In the past I've always used regular expressions purely to validate text input, but did you know you can extract and replace text with RegEx too?

I recently ran into an issue where i needed to replace the following text

BusinessObjects.YesNoQuestion("Are You Sure?", True)

With

MsgBox("Are You Sure?", YesNo)

The tricky part was that I had to do this X number of times and that the message was different for each instance. No problem for regex. Just "tag" the message and backreference it resulting in the following Find/Replace string.

Find: (BusinessObjects\.)@YesNoQuestion\({\"@.+\"@}\, True\)
Replace: MsgBox(\1\, MsgBoxStyle.YesNo)

The curly brackets mark the string to be used later and the \1 used in the replace string iswhere the first tagged will be inserted.

Nice.