VS Code Regex find and replace with lowercase, use \l or \L if possible

Gísli Freyr Svavarsson picture Gísli Freyr Svavarsson · Jan 17, 2020 · Viewed 9.3k times · Source

Is there a way to do a find and replace (regex) all uppercase characters in the matching strings with lowercase ones? Preferably in VS Code or IntelliJ I already have my regex ready.

Edit: To be clear I already know who to find the matches. But looking for that function to replace all uppercase matches with lowercase ones

Answer

Mark picture Mark · Jun 8, 2020

There is support for the case modifiers \L, \l, \U and \u Find/Replace (from Build 1.47 for replacing strings in an editor, and from Build 1.49 it also works in the Find/Replace across the workspace (see https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pull/105101)).

So you just have to put the \l modifier in front of all your matched uppercase groups, like

\l$1 see regex101 demo1

or just put the \L in front of it all, like \L(rest of replace here). see regex1010 demo2


Note that these modifiers work a little differently than you might be used to. For instance:

(de)(pth) Search

\U$1$2 Replace

DEPTH expected result

DEpth vscode result

The case modifier only works on the immediate capture group. Not until it encounters \E or the end of the replace string.

I assume for this same reason \E isn't implemented in vscode at all, as it would be irrelevant given that only the immediate capture group is modified.

So to get DEPTH as the result you should use \U$1\U$2.

The modifiers can also be stacked - for example, \u\u\u$1 will uppercase the first 3 characters of the group, or \l\U$1 will lowercase the first character, and uppercase the rest.

Currently, these are only supported in the editor's find widget, and not in "Find in Files".