How can I search in Visual Studio and get it to ignore what is commented out?

Question

I am refactoring a C++ codebase in Visual Studio 2005. I'm about half way through this process now and I've commented out a lot of old code and replaced or moved it. Now I'm searching to see that I have to change next but the search function keeps bringing me the old commented out stuff I no longer care about. I don't really want to delete that old code yet, just in case.

Is there any way I can search all files in the solution and get results ignoring what is commented out? I don't see a way in visual studio itself, is the perhaps a plug-in that would do it?

Answer 1

As the other provided solutions didn't work for me, I finally discovered the following solution:

^~(:b*//).*your_search_term

Short explanation:

• ^ from beginning of line
• ~( NOT the following
• :b* any number of white spaces, followed by
• // the comment start
• ) end of NOT
• .* any character may appear before
• your_search_term your search term :-)

Obviouly this will only work for // and ///-style comments.

You must click "Use Regular Expressions " Button (dot and asterisk) on your find window to apply regex search

Answer 2

My take:

yes you can use regular expressions, those tend to be too slow and thinking about them distracts from focusing on real stuff - your software.

I prefer non-obtrusive semi-inteligent methods:

Poor man's method: Find references if you happen to use intelisense on

Or even better: Visual assist and it's colored "Find all References" and "Go To" mapped to handy shortcuts. This speeds up navigation tremendously.