Using RegEx in your IDE to speed up coding...

Nathan Strutz posted a cool tip using regular expressions to speed up coding which uses a regular expression to convert a single line list of variables into something actually useful.

You have a list of values on lines and you want to want to apply some code to each:

first_name
middle_initial
last_name
phone
country
state_province
city

Select the lines, and use your IDE's find/replace tool with the regex option. In Eclipse, this is just CTRL+F and check the checkbox. Use this as the search pattern:

^(.+)$

This regex says to select any line with at least one character in it and store it in a character group.

Some code like this would be the replace pattern:
querySetCell(myQuery, "$1", "");

Replace them all and your code will be generated in an instant. The regex will drop each line's content into the $1 backreference.

That's a tip I'll have to remember.

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