Up until a couple of months ago, I had not really used the regular expression Find/Replace in Eclipse. I’d read several blog posts about it, but hadn’t really played around with it much. This all changed after I was, once again, manually replacing some items in Eclipse (setting multiple properties of an object to those of an item that had been passed in to the function). About halfway through, I figured I would try using regular expressions to automate the task a bit. From this point on, just about every find/replace I did was using a regular expression.
All of these examples are for ActionScript, by the way, but could easily be converted to be useful in any other programming language:
For example: (Make sure to remove the double quotes from these examples also.)
I prefer curly braces in my functions to be on the same line as the actual function definition rather than on the next line so I wrote this
Find: "\s+\{"
Replace: " {"This will take something like:
function testing():void
{and change it to
function testing():void {Not a huge deal to most, but my code OCD 
and our in-house coding standards like it on the same line. If I don’t have to manually do this, it certainly makes things easier.
Now this isn’t that complex and in most other IDE’s could be handled pretty easily. However, try doing something like this next example without using some kind of regular expression
(This example is pretty long, so make sure to remove the carriage return before the “return this” statement when pasting into your Replace field)
Find: "public var (\w+):( )?(\w+)( ?= ?[^;]+)?;(([^\t])+(\t)(\t+)?(\s+)?)"
Replace: "private var _$1:$3$4;$5$5public function get $1():$3 {$5$7
return this._$1;$5}$5$5 public function set $1( value:$3 ):void {$5$7this._$1 = value;$5}$5$5"This example will take something like:
public var companyId:uint;
public var companyName:String = "";
public var isLegit:Boolean = false;
Will be converted to multiple accessors (i.e.setters and getters). I won’t show all 3, but this is what the first one would be converted to:
private var _companyId:uint;
public function get companyId():uint {
return this._companyId;
}
public function set companyId( value:uint ):void {
this._companyId = value;
}That has saved me so much coding time.
Anyway, I wish I had started using these earlier as I’m now setting up a nice little library of scripts that I can run whenever I need to modify my code. I’m sure someone has set up a site with a library of these things, but these are just a few that I’ve set up.
And one very important thing to remember with these:
Make sure to check the Regular Expressions checkbox in Find/Replace or it will probably never find anything