Regular Expressions

Here is what I love about regular expressions. They can make your life much easier.

I had to take a list of enumerated values, like this. (The list was a lot longer than shown)

Barbour=1,

Berkeley =2,

Boone =3,

Braxton =4,

Brooke =5,

Cabell =6,

Calhoun =7,

Clay =8,

Doddridge =9,

Fayette =10,

Gilmer =11,

Grant =12,

State=0,

Unknown = 99

and turn it into a switch statements in C# like this...

case 1:

value= LocationID.Barbour;

break;

case 2:

value= LocationID.Berkeley;

break;

case 3:

value= LocationID.Boone;

break;

case 4:

value= LocationID.Braxton;

break;

case 5:

value= LocationID.Brooke;

break;

case 6:

value= LocationID.Cabell;

break;

case 7:

value= LocationID.Calhoun;

break;

case 8:

value= LocationID.Clay;

break;

case 9:

value= LocationID.Doddridge;

break;

case 10:

value= LocationID.Fayette;

break;

case 11:

value= LocationID.Gilmer;

break;

case 12:

value= LocationID.Grant;

break;

case 0:

value= LocationID.State;

break;

case 99:

value= LocationID.Unknown;

break;

I did so using Edit Pad Pro and this search and replace code with Regular expressions

Search:

([a-zA-Z]*)( =)([0-9]*)

Replace:

case \3:

value= LocationID.\1;

break;

Dissecting it, [a-zA-Z] Matches all letters, both upper and lower case, while the asterisk at the end tells it to match all occurrences of it. So "a" and "aaaaaa" would both be a match. The [0-9]* does the same for the code number.

The parentheses separate the search into three terms. The replace using only terms 1 and 3 by specifying a backslash and the term I want (\1 for the first term, \3 for the third term).

The two big advantages are that I don't have to mess with copying and pasting values, which is tedious and time consuming, and I can be sure that I didn't paste the wrong value somewhere.