The Find / Replace Text feature allows you to find all the occurrences of a string in the source code or text files of your project(s). There are several improvements in this feature over the Find and Find in Files features provided by Visual Studio:
- You use a single Find feature instead of two ("Find" and "Find in Files") to search strings.
- The Find Text window (shown below) selects the proper scope of the search automatically, saving you the hassle of selecting it manually. For example, the Find Text window can detect if you are searching occurrences of a parameter and then it sets the scope automatically to the current procedure.
- It allows you to exclude occurrences in comments or literals.
- It allows you to search in a subset of projects or files.
- The results are shown in a Result window which groups results by file, parent code element, etc. and allows you to store previous searches, to remove results from the list, to re-execute the search, etc.
MZ-Tools offers the following ways to find text in your source code:
- The MZ-Tools | Find Text... menu.
- The MZ-Tools | Find Text... context menu of a code window.
- The Find Text... button on the MZ-Tools toolbar.
- The keyboard shortcut associated with the MZTools6_VSXXXX.FindText command.
The Find Text window is the following:
You can apply the search to files of the following kind:
- Any: if you do not want to restrict the search.
- Source Code: to restrict the search to code files (.vb, .cs, etc.)
- HTML: to restrict the search to web pages (.htm, .aspx, .ascx, etc.)
- Text: to restrict the search to text files.
You can use the following search options:
- Match case: to consider or ignore the case.
- Match whole word: to find whole words or to include also substrings.
- Exclude comments: to ignore occurrences inside comments.
- Exclude literals: to ignore occurrences inside literals.
- Use WildCards or Regular Expressions: this setting allows you to use the characters "?" and "*" as wildcards or regular expressions (see the Visual Studio help). When you select one of these options, you can use the Insert > button to the right of the Find text textbox to insert the wildcard or regular expression.
Also, you have the following output options:
- Use new result tab: this setting allows you to choose if you want to reuse the last result tab or to use a new one.
- Show code elements: if this setting is not checked, code elements are not shown in the output, only the file where the result was found is shown; if the setting is checked, parent code elements (class, procedure, etc.) where the result was found are shown too.
Once you have performed the search, the Result Window allows you to replace the found text with another text in some or all of the occurrences. To do this:
- Show the Replace panel by clicking the Show Text Replace Panel button.
- Replace the found text with another text, or replace the whole line where the text was found with a different line that you can compose.
- Select whether or not to keep open the modified documents (allowing undo).
- Click the Replace Selected Node button to replace the selected node (with its children) or the Replace All Nodes button to replace all nodes. When a found text of a node is replaced, the node is removed from the list.
Remarks:
- This feature does not work with Web Forms or HTML pages in Design view, it only works in HTML view.
See Also: