Question

I am looking for a regualr expression to find in VS2010 solution files for string.empty and replace with string.IsNullOrEmpty

for ex if (strText != string.Empty) to string.IsNullOrEmpty(strText)

Answer 1

In VS2012 this has become a lot easier, since the Regex language used was improved quite a bit:

Search:

 \b(?<variable>[\w_-]+)\s*==\s*string.Empty

Replace:

 string.IsNullOrEmpty(${variable})

The overall idea is the same for Visual Studio 2010:

Search:

 {[A-Za-z0-9_\-]+}:b*==:b*string\.Empty

Replace:

 string.IsNullOrEmpty(\1)

And as others have noted, be sure to have either unit tests to verify you didn’t break anything, or check each replacement to be sure.