Visual Studio 2010 Regular Expressions in Quick Replace Dialog

Question

0.00/5 (No votes)

See more:

VS2010

Hi,

I am finding it impossible to come up with a pair of regular expressions to remove sequences of more than one space and replace them with single spaces in a HTML document loaded into Visual Studio 2010.

I've read all the help (including using :b which is supposed to match a space), and I just can't get it to work. Can anyone offer any help with this, please? It's driving me nuts.

Kind wishes, Patrick

Posted 6-Dec-12 2:13am

Patrick Skelton

Add a Solution

1 solution

Add a Solution

Add your solution here

Treat my content as plain text, not as HTML

Preview 0

…

Existing Members

Sign in to your account

...or Join us

Download, Vote, Comment, Publish.

Your Email
Password
Forgot your password?

Your Email
This email is in use. Do you need your password?
Optional Password

I have read and agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
Please subscribe me to the CodeProject newsletters

When answering a question please:

Read the question carefully.
Understand that English isn't everyone's first language so be lenient of bad spelling and grammar.
If a question is poorly phrased then either ask for clarification, ignore it, or edit the question and fix the problem. Insults are not welcome.
Don't tell someone to read the manual. Chances are they have and don't get it. Provide an answer or move on to the next question.

Let's work to help developers, not make them feel stupid.

This content, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)

Richard MacCutchan · Accepted Answer · 2012-12-06T03:18:00

Solution 1

Your search pattern should be :b+ (one or more spaces), and your replacement just a single space character, or whatever other string you want.

Posted 6-Dec-12 3:18am

Richard MacCutchan

Comments

Patrick Skelton 6-Dec-12 11:50am

Thank you for your answer. Unfortunately, I have already tried that. When it gets to two spaces in a row, it matches only the second, so when I replace it with a single space, I get back the same.

I wonder if I can try replacing it with nothing and applying the same replace over and over until I have got rid of the longest string of spaces (which is about 16, I think). Sort of a functional programming approach.

I'll try it now.

- Patrick

Richard MacCutchan 6-Dec-12 11:59am

Well I have just tested it with :b+ and a single space as replacement character and it correctly replaces two spaces by one.

Patrick Skelton 6-Dec-12 12:44pm

Yes, thanks, Richard. Please see my comments below why it wasn't working for me.

- Patrick

Patrick Skelton 6-Dec-12 11:52am

Doh! No - obviously that doesn't work, because it gets rid of all spaces.

Patrick Skelton 6-Dec-12 12:12pm

I should have done this before. Checking the hex for the file, it turns out where there are multiple spaces, all but one are 0x2e (non-breaking-space character). I can find these easily enough, using \x00a0, but when I leave the Replace With box blank, the Replace button is greyed out, so I cannot replace these with nothing - even though that's exactly what MSDN says you can do.

Grrr ....

- Patrick

Patrick Skelton 6-Dec-12 12:24pm

I was obviously doing something stupid because it works now. I can turn on regular expressions and replace \x00a0 with an empty string.

Thank you to anyone who has taken the time to read my stumbling steps towards a solution.

- Patrick

Richard MacCutchan 6-Dec-12 13:10pm

Well done, you obviously have all the right skills.