my  block

where uzairs roam

(This has been sitting in my Performancing extension for several weeks, so since I haven’t updated recently, might as well publish it.)

I’ve just discovered that the regular expressions available through Find/Replace in VS.NET 2003 are not standard .NET/POSIX regular expressions. It seems curlies ({, }) specify tagged expressions. Unfortunately, this means one of the most important elements in regular expressions, quantifiers, are simply not available.

Quantifiers include the wildcards (*, + and ?) most people are familiar with as well as the following constructs:

•  `{2}` — matches the preceding identifier twice
• `{2,3}` — matches the preceding identifier between two and three times
• `{2,}` — matches the preceding identifier at least twice
  

More reading is at MSDN’s Regular Expressions (Visual Studio) and Wildcards (Visual Studio) pages.