One of the blogs I read is Zain Naboulsi’s Visual Studio Tips and Tricks. In a recent post he discussed the power of using Find and Replace with regular expressions and it gave me an idea about how to quickly reverse a set of assignment statements.
Lets say you have the following code:
Me.FirstNameTextBox.Text = customer.FirstName
Me.LastNameTextBox.Text = customer.LastName
Me.TelephoneTextBox.Text = customer.Telephone
Me.EmailTextBox.Text = customer.Email
And you want to reverse the assignments so that you are writing the textboxes back into the customer object (generally the next thing you would want to do). Rather than doing it by hand, or using some macro, you can use the find and replace window with a regular expression:
This works because the expression matches any character (.) zero or more times (*), followed by an equals sign then any character zero or more times. In other words, anything followed by “=” followed by anything. The two anythings in the expression are enclosed with curly brackets to make them tagged expressions, which means they can be used in the replace expression. \1 will be the first tagged expression, \2 then next and so on. So our replace with expression just says replace a=b with b=a.
So what do you end up with? Well, this of course:
customer.FirstName = Me.FirstNameTextBox.Text
customer.LastName = Me.LastNameTextBox.Text
customer.Telephone = Me.TelephoneTextBox.Text
customer.Email = Me.EmailTextBox.Text
