Replace text in a Visual Studio Code Snippet Literal

Question

Is it possible to replace text in a Visual Studio Snippet literal after the enter key is pressed and the snippet exits its edit mode?

For example, given a snippet like this:

 public void $name$
 {
   $end$
 }

If I were to enter $name$ as:

 My function name

is it possible to have Visual Studio change it to:

 My_function_name

or

 MyFunctionName

There are only four functions available while inserting code snippet. Currently there is no option to create user defined functions. three of them - msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms242312.aspx Callbase - Returns a call to the base member, or returns a NotImplementedException if the member is abstract. — Sandeep Kumar M
– Sandeep Kumar M, Commented Dec 1, 2009 at 6:55
You should answer this in an answer so it can be voted on and accepted. — y0mbo
– y0mbo, Commented Dec 1, 2009 at 21:11
Snippet functionality is very limited. It's just text insert. After many years, VS did not add needed basic string manipulation. — fcm
– fcm, Commented Dec 22, 2018 at 19:23

MincedMeatMole · Accepted Answer · 2020-04-03 10:08:25Z

14

After many years there is an answer, for anyone still coming across this question:

"Replace Whitespaces": {
    "prefix": "wrap2",
    "body": [
        "${TM_SELECTED_TEXT/[' ']/_/gi}",
    ],
    "description": "Replace all whitespaces of highlighted Text with underscores"
},

Add this to your user snippets. Or alternativly you can add a keyboard shortcut like this:

{
    "key": "ctrl+shift+y",
    "command": "editor.action.insertSnippet",
    "when": "editorTextFocus",
    "args": {
        "snippet": "${TM_SELECTED_TEXT/[' ']/_/gi}"            
    }
},

Hope this helps anyone coming across this in the future

answered Apr 3, 2020 at 10:08

MincedMeatMole

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2 Comments

ultraGentle Over a year ago

This is awesome! If you selected some text like ' te'xt ', could you use this to replace the outermost single quotes with double quotes?

MincedMeatMole Over a year ago

@Tedskovsky Probably - the replacement in the snippet part is just a RegEx. As I only know my basic ways around RegEx-Magic (it definitely is magic), maybe try asking this in a seperate question.

Pete Hayman · Accepted Answer · 2023-01-30 02:15:36Z

2

In my case the goal was to replace a single instance of the word Authoring with Baker:

${TM_FILENAME_BASE/(Authoring)/Baker/}

answered Jan 30, 2023 at 2:15

Pete Hayman

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Comments

BPH · Accepted Answer · 2020-12-27 15:26:17Z

1

It's great. I used it to wrap things in a function with quotes. If a selection has quotes it can remove the quotes. In the snippet part, it seems to break down into:

TM_SELECTED_TEXT - this is the input
[ ' '] - regex find
_ - regex replace
gi - global flag for regex

So what I wanted is change: "User logged in" into: <%= gettext("User logged in") %> For this in the snippet I used:

"body": ["<%= gettext(\"${TM_SELECTED_TEXT/['\"']//gi}\") %>"],

Note: you need to escape the quotein the regular expression, therefore: " becomes \".

edited Dec 27, 2020 at 15:26

answered Sep 27, 2020 at 5:30

BPH

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