Searching For String Literals

Question

In the quest for localization I need to find all the string literals littered amongst our source code. I was looking for a way to script this into a post-modification source

Answer 1

Visual Studio 2010 and earlier:

1. Find In Files (CTRL+SHIFT+F)
2. Use: Regular Expressions
3. Find: :q (quoted string)
4. Find All

Find Results window will now contain a report of all files, with line numbers and the line itself with the quoted string.

For Visual Studio 2012 and later search for ((\".+?\")|('.+?')) (reference, hat-tip to @CincauHangus)

Answer 2

To find all Text="textonly" instances use the following Regular Expression when searching:

(Text=)(")([a-z])

This is help for finding Text="*" but excluding text that's already been converted to use resource files:

Text="<%$ Resources:LocalizedText, KeyNameFromResourceFile%>"

Also (>)([a-z]) can be used to find literals between tags like so:

<h1>HeaderText</h1>

Answer 3

It uses the compiled binary instead of source, but Sysinternals' Strings app might be useful.

Answer 4

There's a C# parser on CodePlex that you can probably use.

Answer 5

1. Find In Files (CTRL+SHIFT+F)
2. Find options -> Check Use Regular Expressions

For specific text within the literal:

3. Find what: "+.*(MYSPECIFICTEXT)+.*"+

For all literals

3. Find what: "+.*"+

Then

4. Find All

Answer 6

hi this is regex for searching literals, that I use to find a text for translation. it also includes empty spaces and different quotes

regex: ([",,'])([\w,\s]*)([",,'])

searchstring: var test='This is a test';