Question

I have tried to find all Validators in our project in Visual Studio 2010. Those are like that:

<asp:RequiredFieldValidator
    ID="validator"
    runat="server"
    ErrorMessage="*"
    ControlToValidate="control"
    Display="Static"
    ValidationGroup="main">*</asp:RequiredFieldValidator>

or

<asp:RequiredFieldValidator
    ID="validator"
    runat="server"
    ErrorMessage="*"
    ControlToValidate="control"
    Display="Static"
    ValidationGroup="main"
    Text="*"/>

I have tried with below validators with no results:

(\<asp\:[a-zA-Z]*Validator)~((.|\n)*ValidationGroup)(.|\n)*\/\>
(\<asp\:[a-zA-Z]*Validator)~(ValidationGroup)(.|\n)*(\<\/asp\:[a-zA-Z]*Validator\>)$

Do you see any bugs in them?

EDIT:

I have tried with below successfully (but only on site http://derekslager.com/blog/posts/2007/09/a-better-dotnet-regular-expression-tester.ashx):

\<asp\:[a-zA-Z]*Validator(?![^/]*ValidationGroup)[^/]*\<\/asp\:[a-zA-Z]*Validator\>

But when I replaced ?! with ~ it still doesn’t work in Visual Studio.

But probably mellamokb posted correct answer!

Answer 1

I built this VS regex which seems to work for the first case:

(\<asp\:[a-zA-Z]*Validator)((:b|\n)+~(ValidationGroup)[a-zA-Z]+="[^"]*")+\>

I took your basic idea and searched for each attribute individually with the expression (:b|\n)+[a-zA-Z]+\"[^"]*". Then I search for multiples to grab all the attributes, and finally added a ~(ValidationGroup) to prevent the matching from completing if any of the attributes are named ValidationGroup.