Invert assignment direction in Visual Studio [duplicate]

Answer 1

Please see this question: Is there a method to swap the left and right hand sides of a set of expressions in Visual Studio?

My answer to that question has a macro that you can use to swap the assignments for a block of code.

Answer 2

Select the lines you want to swap, Ctrl+H, then replace:

{:i}:b*=:b*{:i};

with:

\2 = \1;

with "Look in:" set to "Selection"

That only handles C/C++ style identifiers, though (via the ":i"). Replace that with:

{.*}:b*=:b*{.*};

to replace anything on either side of the "=".

Also, since you mentioned in a comment you use ReSharper, you can just highlight the "=", Alt+Enter, and "Reverse assignment".

Answer 3

what about replace all (CTRL-H)

you can replace for example "i = j;" by "j = i;"

you can use regular expressions in that dialog. I'm not so sure about how you should pop-up help about them however. In that dialog, press F1, then search that page for more information on regular expressions.

I like this dialog because it allows you to go through each replacement. Because the chance of breaking something is high, I think this is a more secure solution

Answer 4

In Visual Studio 2015+ after selecting code block press Ctrl + H:

Find: (\w+.\w+) = (\w+);

Replace: $2 = $1;

For example:

entity.CreateDate = CreateDate;

changes to:

CreateDate = entity.CreateDate;

Answer 5

I've improved the expression a little.

Replace

(\t+)(\s*)(\S*) = (\S*);

with

$1$2$4 = $3;

The reason is, it will look for lines starting with tab (\t). It will skip the lines starting with definition. E.g.:

        TestClass tc = new TestClass();
        int a = 75;
        int b = 76;
        int c = 77;

        a = tc.a;
        b = tc.b;
        a = tc.c;

Would ignore the int a, int b and int c and swap only the assignments.

Answer 6

Unfortunatly I don't have Visual Studio, so I can't try in the target environment, but if it uses standard regexps, you could probably do it like this: Search for "(:Al) = (:Al);", and replace with "\2 = \1". (\1 and \2 are references to the first and second capture groups, in this case the parenthesises around the \w:s)

EDIT
Ok, not \w... But according to MSDN, we can instead use :Al. Edited above to use that instead.
Also, from the MSDN page I gather that it should work, as the references seem to work as usual.