Find and replace in files - .NET friendly regular expression syntax

Question

I'm looking for a decent tool that can do search and replace over multiple files, with regular expression syntax I'm use to in C#. Normally I would do this in Visual Studio, except it has the strangest regex syntax (and this is meant to be faster than just replacing the text in the files manually).

So far I've tried windows grep but it didn't like the regex below. The regex in question is

<see cref="(?<class>.+)">(.+)</see>

To replace with

<see cref="${class}"/>

Alternatively converting this to Visual Studio's syntax would be fine!

Jeff has a whole post on this on his blog.

Answer 1

In Visual Studio, find:

\<see cref="{:i}"\>.*\</see\>

and replace with:

<see cref="\1"/>

{} is the VS grouping operator. It is not named. In replacements \n is used for the value of the n-th group in the find expression.

You can tweak the :i and .* parts if you need to account for new lines or other whitespace.