Question

I’ve finally found references to both Visual Studio’s regular expressions for Find and Replace, and .NET’s regular expression package, and now out of morbid curiousity I want to know: why the difference!?

I’m sure there’s a technical, historical, or usability reason, but it confused the bajeepers [sp? 😉 ] out of me at first.

Answer 1

I’d speculate that the VS regexes are designed to match code well, having defined lots of handy shortcuts like :w for an entire word, or :i for a C++ identifier, or :q for a quoted string.

They usually don’t need to handle arbitrary data that you’d need lookaround assertions and stuff like that for. Or at least that was lower on the priorities list.