Learning by doing

I usually have to look this up, so I am posting it to my blog. Visual Studio 2005 has a "Regular Expression" option on the "search and replace" dialog. (Previous .Net editions had it as well.) I occasionally want to rewrite several lines of text without writing a macro or wearing out my fingers. Here's what I do ... If I have a file with several lines of DECLARE R1 = VC WITH CONSTANT("TEST1") DECLARE R20 = VC WITH CONSTANT("TEST2") DECLARE R31 = VC WITH CONSTANT("TEST3") DECLARE R42 = VC WITH CONSTANT("TEST4") And I would like to convert these to SET R1 = "TEST1" SET R20 = "TEST2" SET R31 = "TEST3" SET R42 = "TEST4" I would search for "declare [R|r]{.*} = .* with constant\({.*}\)" and replace with "set r\1 = \2" (don't add quotes into the search dialog). This grabs the text in curly braces and assigns it to \1 and \2, so I can re-assemble it as I wish. I