Question

In Visual Studio 2010, how do you search for text that is not within a single line comment? E. G. how to find “bas” in:

foo bar bas

but not in

foo bar // bas

Note that it should find the line:

foo / bar / bas

(edit) And it should not find the line:

foo // bar bas

Answer 1

Okay, so I asked this question just so I could refer back to my own answer.

Visual Studio doesn’t seem to have the typical look-ahead, look-behind constructs. It does have a similar zero-width negative assertion. The syntax is ~(x) which means the pattern does not match x at this point in the pattern. Using this construct, I came up with this: ^(.~(//))*bas Which works really well, but won’t exclude a line where // are the first two characters on the line. A version to fix that is: ^~(//)(.~(//))*bas