Copy value of watch variable in visual studio without escape characters

Question

Ok, this one has been driving me bonkers for ages and VS 2010 hasn't improved this. Say I have a variable like so

string szSql = 
@"SELECT 
     Foo, Bar
FROM
     Table
WHERE
     Foo = Bar";

If I'm inspecting this in the debugger and choose "Copy Value" the value put into the clipboard has \r\n's in place of the carriage returns which is a bit of a pain. Is there a way to change this behaviour? (I know I can print it in the command window...)

Cheers,

Alex

Answer 1

Use the "text visualizer" popup on the value and copy it to the clipboard from there. It will be unescaped.

Answer 2

For lengthy text, such as a large xml document, I always use the immediate window. Just type this in and hit enter:

System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(szSql)

and it will spit out the text with line breaks and without escape characters. I then copy from the immediate window.