Regex: Find/Replace All Substrings Without a Given String Before?

Question

I need to find all strings without a given string before it.

For Instance:

Find: "someValue"

**All results with "function(" before them should be ignored

The Visual Studio regular expression would find this:

value = someValue

And Ignore something looking like this:

function(someValue)

What is the best way to go about this?

Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

You could use negative look-behind:

(?<!function\()someValue

Answer 2

You said

The Visual Studio regular expression would find this:

Combined with the title of your question, that makes me think you're trying to do something in a search and replace dialog in Visual Studio, rather than using a regex in an application.

If that's the case, then I think you might be out of luck; Visual Studio's regular expressions aren't very powerful, and they have a rather odd syntax that doesn't seem to be used anywhere else!

My advice would be to either use a different text editor, or use the regex described by SilentGhost in a .NET application (or PowerShell script) to do the replacement for you. When I need to do regex stuff in an editor and Studio doesn't cut it, I tend to use TextPad. It's not very pretty, but it's powerful and has great macro support.

Incidentally, if you want to use PowerShell to do it, this will search foo.js, and copy the output to fooNew.js:

(get-content D:\junk\foo.js) -replace
    '(?<!function\()someValue', 'someOtherValue' > D:\junk\fooNew.js