Visual Studio 2010: Regex Replacement with Parenthesis

[Aikouka]

I'm a pretty big fan of using regular expressions. Frankly, I just find them really fun to write; however, there's one issue that I've never been able to solve, and my Google Fu has failed me in finding a solution. The issue is that I cannot use parenthesis in the replacement field in Visual Studio 2010, and yes, I am escaping them (i.e. "\("). Whenever I do this, VS refuses to execute the replace until I replace the parenthesis, which I've either done using tagged groups (i.e. "{😛s}" and "{😛e}" in the search field and using the respective \# in the replace field) or used things like carets ('<' and '>') and replaced them later. I've also had mixed success with using the escaped parenthesis in the search field, but it usually works.

So, I'm wondering... am I missing something? I can use any other standard regex character as long as I escape it except for the (open or close) parenthesis.

 

[Sgraffite]

It seems to work ok in VS 2013. If you are not using them for grouping and searching for them as text, have you tried double escaping them?

 

[Aikouka]

It seems to work ok in VS 2013. If you are not using them for grouping and searching for them as text, have you tried double escaping them?

Well, I feel like a bit of a dumb-dumb now. 😳

So, it's actually a much simpler solution... just don't escape it. I'm so used to escaping everything in the find field that I just do it in the replace field. The thing is... the only thing that you need to escape is a number as a reference to a grouping from the find field. The part that made it confusing for me is that escaping in the replace field actually works for any character except for an open/close parenthesis. So, I didn't really think anything of whether or not you actually had to do it. I sat there looking at it for a minute, and just thought, "Wait... why do I even do this? It's not like things such as grouping actually matters in the replace string." 😛