Question

I want to find all if statements and for statements which are not followed by curly brackets ‘{‘. When you write a single line in an if statement you do not mostly enclose it in curly brackets, so I want to find all those if and for statements.

Please help!

Like I want to capture this statement

if (childNode.Name == 'B')     return TokenType.Bold; 

but not these kinds

if (childNode.Name == 'B') {     return TokenType.Bold; } 

I want to do it with regex.

Answer 1

Since the underlying mathematics disallow a perfect match, you could go for a good heuristic like ‘find all ‘if‘ followed by a semicolon without an intervening open brace:

/\<if\>[^{]*;/ 

where \< and \> are begin-of-word and end-of-word as applicable to your regex dialect. Also take care to ignore all newlines in the input, some regex processors need to be told to do that.

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You might want to look at StyleCop too. This is a tool which runs a big set of various checks on your source code. This check is already there.