Tool/trick to replace tabs in all files of an entire VS solution
Visual StudioVisual Studio-2010Visual Studio Problem Overview
My solution (30+ project) is a bit of a mess when it comes to mixing tabs and spaces, and I want to fix this with one easy step.
Does anybody know a trick/tool to do this in one step for the entire solution?
EDIT: Not exactly what I meant. I want the documents to be nicely formatted. Just find/replace wont do.. documents will still be a mess. I want something like the Format -> Advanced -> Format Document command
Visual Studio Solutions
Solution 1 - Visual Studio
In case if your files contains spaces as tabs of equal width all along the solution (i.e. 4 spaces per tab), then you should use plain VS's Quick replace
tool. In order to follow StyleCop
's formatting rules, you should use spaces instead of tabs, so go to Quick replace
(CTRL-h), select Use wildcard
and then in Find what
field you can use \t
symbol, replacing it with 4 spaces for all solution (Look in
field).
But if your solution files contains tabs made of spaces of different width, or you want to apply single-style formatting, then you definitely should use Resharper's feature to reformat code. This feature is called Code Cleanup. To apply code cleanup
to whole solution or selected project, go to the solution explorer and select Cleanup code
in context menu. But before launching reformatting on whole solution try and tweak it on one file, there's a lot of options in Resharper's settings.
Solution 2 - Visual Studio
there you go:
using System;
using System.IO;
class _Runner {
static void Main(string[] args) {
var root=args[0];
var filePaths = Directory.GetFiles(root, "*.cs", SearchOption.AllDirectories);
int updated = 0;
foreach (var path in filePaths) {
var content = File.ReadAllText(path);
var replaced = content.Replace(" ", "\t");
if (replaced == content) {
continue;
}
++updated;
Console.WriteLine("fixing " + path);
File.WriteAllText(path, replaced);
}
Console.WriteLine("fixed {0} files", updated);
}
}
Save is as spaces-to-tabs.cs
, and run:
C:>c:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\csc spaces-to-tab.cs
C:>spaces-to-tabs.exe C:\path\to\your\solution
Solution 3 - Visual Studio
I keep a unix tool directory in my path when working in Windows, for just such emergencies. For instance, this would replace all tabs with 4 spaces, in any .cs files in the c:\myproject directory or it's subdirectories.
find c:\myproject -name *.cs -exec sed -i -e "\"s/\t/ /g\"" {} ";"
Solution 4 - Visual Studio
A simple and fast way is to open file in notepad++ and either replace it manually (switch on 'show all characters' and tabs will be highlighted), or replace it automatically (have to play with a 'Settings')
Solution 5 - Visual Studio
Not a perfect solution, but the extension "Fix Mixed Tabs" is a huge help https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=VisualStudioProductTeam.FixMixedTabs
Basically when you open a file that has mixed tabs/spaces whitespace, it popup up a toolbar at the top of the file to allow you to normalize it
Solution 6 - Visual Studio
ctrl-h, set "Look in:" to "entire solution"
Also you can record a macro.