Regular expression woes

[Frits van Bommel]

Lionello Lunesu wrote:
> "just jeff" <jeffrparsons at optusnet.com.au> wrote in message 
> news:eopti4$lan$1 at digitaldaemon.com...
>>> VS2005 did find them, using x. at x
>> Ack, I can't find any documentation on the use of "@". Funny, that; I've 
>> never had much luck with Microsoft's documentation at all... ;)
>>
>> Care to elaborate?
> 
> http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/2k3te2cs(VS.80).aspx
> 
> But, interestingly, the .NET framework uses the same .*?
> 
> http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/3206d374(VS.80).aspx

Looks like the .NET framework uses the "standard" syntax. The reason VS 
uses a different syntax is probably because it's meant to search in 
source code and some characters like *() etc are commonly used in C-like 
languages. Therefore they might be the characters searched for quite 
often, and excessive quoting is inconvenient. @{} are probably searched 
for a lot less, so they are arguably better choices for meta-characters 
in this context.