Searching For String Literals

Visual Studio 2010 and earlier:

  1. Find In Files (CTRL+SHIFT+F)
  2. Use: Regular Expressions
  3. Find: :q (quoted string)
  4. Find All

Find Results window will now contain a report of all files, with line numbers and the line itself with the quoted string.

For Visual Studio 2012 and later search for ((\".+?\")|('.+?')) (reference, hat-tip to @CincauHangus)


To find all Text="textonly" instances use the following Regular Expression when searching:

(Text=)(")([a-z])

This is help for finding Text="*" but excluding text that's already been converted to use resource files:

Text="<%$ Resources:LocalizedText, KeyNameFromResourceFile%>"

Also (>)([a-z]) can be used to find literals between tags like so:

<h1>HeaderText</h1>

It uses the compiled binary instead of source, but Sysinternals' Strings app might be useful.