Question

does anyone know of a tool or extension to Visual Studio 2010 to count non-whitespace (e.g. all characters but not spaces, new lines etc.) for current selection in a document?

Nice to have for code golfing 🙂

I have a command line tool, but an integrated tool would be very nice. Also I would prefer something to evaluate current selection.

Answer 1

I finally got to creating this crude macro below by first recording a temporary macro in Visual Studio and then modifying it to look like the below:

Option Strict Off
Option Explicit Off
Imports System
Imports EnvDTE
Imports EnvDTE80
Imports EnvDTE90
Imports EnvDTE90a
Imports EnvDTE100
Imports System.Diagnostics

Public Module CountNonWhiteSpaceCharacters
    Sub Count()
        Dim selection As EnvDTE.TextSelection = DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection()
        Dim text As String = selection.Text

        text = text.Replace(" ", "")
        text = text.Replace(vbCrLf, "")
        text = text.Replace(vbTab, "")

        MsgBox("Count " + text.Length.ToString())
    End Sub    
End Module

This can be bound to a keybord shortcut if desired. Otherwise, double clicking it in Macro Explorer will run it.