Replace With Regex Using VSCode
Published: June 7, 2024
Background
Imagine you have a long list of stuff that looks like this:
let data = [
{image: house.jpg},
{image: kitchen.jpg},
{image: bedroom.jpg},
{image: rooftop.jpg},
{image: terrace.jpg},
]And that you decided to have 2 images instead. One thumbnail image and one large image to serve on your website.
So you want add some more elements into your array in order to make it look like below:
data = [
{image: {large: house.jpg, small:houseSmall.jpg}},
{image: {large: kitchen.jpg, small:kitchenSmall.jpg}},
{image: {large: bedroom.jpg, small:bedroomSmall.jpg}},
{image: {large: rooftop.jpg, small:rooftopSmall.jpg}},
{image: {large: terrace.jpg, small:terraceSmall.jpg}},
]How can we do this?
Method
As you can see, this is not a simple find & replace. We need to keep track of what is inside each object (bedroom, rooftop, etc) and keep them in memory somehow and make a replacement.
Luckily, VSCode lets us do this in its find & replace function.
Open VSCode. Open up Find & Replace function by pressing CTRL+F. Turn on Regex option (Rightmost button)
Now we need to enter the regex function so that we can target what is after image in each item.
The regex expression we use in this case is (?<=image: )(.*)(?=.jpg \})
This helps us target all items that are in between image: and
.jpg }
This is how it works:
You can see that it has selected 5 items correctly. Now we needed to put them into memory when we do the replacement.
This is where $1 comes into play. What
this does is that, it keeps track of what was found. Then
$1 can be used when replacing things to
refer back to those values.
In our case, this is what we'd need to write in our replace area: {large:$1.jpg, small:$1Small
And click on Replace all button.
Tada!
We have more or less achieved our objective, but in order to complete this, let's add one more curly bracket to each item:
Voila!
Conlusion
In this post, we have found a way to replace things using regex while keeping find results in memory on VSCode.
Making this kind of find - replace was a pain in the ass for me personally, especially for long arrays, but now this will help me reduce my workload a little bit.
Hope it was helpful for you too.
Happy hacking!
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