VSCode 1.49.1 Case Changing In Regex Replace

I was looking through the VSCode 1.49.1 release notes and saw this cool new feature which allows you to do case changing in regex replace.

In June, we added support for changing the case of regex matching groups while doing a Find/Replace in the editor. This month, we've added the same feature for Search/Replace across the workspace. This is done with the modifiers \u\U\l\L, where \u and \l will upper/lowercase a single character, and \U and \L will upper/lowercase the rest of the matching group.

So what does this actually mean? Let's say we had a bit of javascript where we didn't type the component names properly:

const textInputComponent = () => (
...
)
const textAreaComponent = () => (
...
)

What we want to do is convert the variable names to a upper first character. To do this with just the find and replace menu we can do the following:

Search (with regex turned on): (const )([a-zA-Z]*) Replace: $1\u$2

Replaced:

const TextInputComponent = () => (
...
)
const TextAreaComponent = () => (
...
)

As you can see the \u will take the first character of the matched group $2 (second group as the first is actually "const ").

Let's make up one more contrived example 😅

Ok, so we have react/redux app and have a set of object map for actions for some reducer. Let's say right now it looks something like this:

const actions = {
  increment: "increment",
  decrement: "decrement",
};

Let's see what we can do by using \U this time.

Search (with regex turned on): ([a-z]*?)(: "[a-z]*?") Replace: $1\U$2

Replaced:

const actions = {
  increment: "INCREMENT",
  decrement: "DECREMENT",
};

Hope that helps someone out with another tool in their tool belt when it comes to making text transformations at either a file or project level!