How can I search in Visual Studio and get it to ignore what is commented out?

Question

I am refactoring a C++ codebase in Visual Studio 2005. I\'m about half way through this process now and I\'ve commented out a lot of old code and replaced or moved it. Now I\'

Answer 1

If you comment your old code with // you can use regular expressions while searching for something in your codebase. Something like this for example: ^[^/][^/].*your_function_name.*.

Answer 2

Previous answer gave a false-positive on cases where otherwise matching lines were placed on lines containing other source:

++i; // your_search_term gets found, don't want it found

So replaced the :b* with .* and added the <> so only entire words are found, and then went after some of the older C-style comments where there's a /* on the line:

^~(.*//)~(.*/\*).*<your_search_term>

In my case I was hunting for all instances of new, not amenable to refactor assistance, and boatloads of false-positives. I also haven't figured out how to avoid matches in quoted strings.

Answer 3

My take:

yes you can use regular expressions, those tend to be too slow and thinking about them distracts from focusing on real stuff - your software.

I prefer non-obtrusive semi-inteligent methods:

Poor man's method: Find references if you happen to use intelisense on

Or even better: Visual assist and it's colored "Find all References" and "Go To" mapped to handy shortcuts. This speeds up navigation tremendously.

Answer 4

In Visual Basic within Visual Studio 2015, I was able to search for text outside of comments by adapting glassiko's comment from the most upvoted answer

^(?![ \t]*[']).*mysearchterm

And in C# you would use glassiko's comment exactly as it was

 ^(?![ \t]*//).*mysearchterm

Answer 5

As the other provided solutions didn't work for me, I finally discovered the following solution:

^~(:b*//).*your_search_term

Short explanation:

• ^ from beginning of line
• ~( NOT the following
• :b* any number of white spaces, followed by
• // the comment start
• ) end of NOT
• .* any character may appear before
• your_search_term your search term :-)

Obviouly this will only work for // and ///-style comments.

You must click "Use Regular Expressions " Button (dot and asterisk) on your find window to apply regex search

Answer 6

Just to add on, as I was doing a "find all" for division operator used in the code, used the below to exclude comments as well as </ and /> from aspx files:

^~(.*//)~(.*/\*)~(.*\<\/)~(.*/\>).*/