How do you reference a capture group with regex find and replace in Visual Studio 2012, 2013, 2015, and VS Code

To find and replace in VS 2012 and VS 2015 you do the following:

Example (thanks to syonip)

In the find options, make sure 'use regular expressions' is checked, and put the following as the text to find:

_platformActions.InstallApp$(.+)$

And the following as the text to replace it with:

this.Platform().App($1).Install()

Note: As SLaks points out in a comment below, the change in regex syntax is due to VS2012 switching to the standard .Net regex engine.

Note: Another commenter pointed out that this works in Visual Studio Code (vscode) as well

To add an example of this, here is something I had to do in my code:

Find what:

_platformActions.InstallApp\((.+)\)

Replace with:

this.Platform().App($1).Install()

This replaces any call to InstallApp(x), with this.Platform().App(x).Install().

*Don't forget to mark "Use regular expressions" in Find options

If you want to work with using group names (using the same sample as above):

Find what:

_platformActions\.InstallApp\((?<mygroupname>.+)\)

Replace with:

this.Platform().App(${mygroupname}).Install()

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