What flavor of Regex does Visual Studio Code use?

The regular expressions used by Visual Studio Code are based on the JavaScript regular expression syntax. This means that when using the search and replace functionality in Visual Studio Code, you can leverage various features of JavaScript regular expressions, such as special characters, quantifiers, assertions, and character classes.

For example, if you want to search for all IP addresses in a project, you can use the following regular expression:

regex
\b\d{1,3}\\.\d{1,3}\\.\d{1,3}\\.\d{1,3}\b

This expression is explained as follows:

• \b denotes a word boundary, ensuring that IP addresses are treated as standalone words.
• \d{1,3} matches digits from 1 to 3.
• . is a special character in regular expressions that matches any single character; however, here we need to match the literal dot character, so it is escaped with a backslash.
• The final \b similarly ensures the word boundary at the end.

Using this regular expression, Visual Studio Code's search functionality can help you quickly locate all possible IP addresses in your project. This is very useful for code reviews or security audits.