removing #region

Question

I had to take over a c# project. The guy who developed the software in the first place was deeply in love with #region because he wrapped everything with regions. It makes me almost crazy and I was looking for a tool or addon to remove all #region from the project. Is there something around?

Answer 1

Just use Visual Studio's built-in "Find and Replace" (or "Replace in Files", which you can open by pressing Ctrl + Shift + H).

To remove #region, you'll need to enable Regular Expression matching; in the "Replace In Files" dialog, check "Use: Regular Expressions". Then, use the following pattern: "\#region .*\n", replacing matches with "" (the empty string).

To remove #endregion, do the same, but use "\#endregion .*\n" as your pattern. Regular Expressions might be overkill for #endregion, but it wouldn't hurt (in case the previous developer ever left comments on the same line as an #endregion or something).

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Note: Others have posted patterns that should work for you as well, they're slightly different than mine but you get the general idea.

Answer 2

Use one regex ^[ \t]*\#[ \t]*(region|endregion).*\n to find both: region and endregion. After replacing by empty string, the whole line with leading spaces will be removed.

[ \t]* - finds leading spaces

\#[ \t]*(region|endregion) - finds #region or #endregion (and also very rare case with spaces after #)

.*\n - finds everything after #region or #endregion (but in the same line)

EDIT: Answer changed to be compatible with old Visual Studio regex syntax. Was: ^[ \t]*\#(end)?region.*\n (question marks do not work for old syntax)

EDIT 2: Added [ \t]* after # to handle very rare case found by @Volkirith