Removing trailing whitespace

Question

_{Saturday, August 1, 2009 1:46 PM}

There has to be a setting somewhere to remove, or not insert, any trailing whitespace from each code or comment line.

I am using VS2008/Sp1 and primarily coding in C# but this applies to any other language as well. I have gone through all the tools->Options->Text Editor options and nothing jumps out at me.

I thought that I had seen this option in some verion of Visual Studio

Scott

All replies (2)

_{Monday, August 3, 2009 4:05 AM ✅Answered | 1 vote}

Hi Scott

Thanks for your feedback.

Actually, this issue has been filed at Add ability to trim trailing spaces (tabs) .
The workaround is recording a macro to do this:

In Find what: {:b}*\n
In Replace with: \n
In Find Options, check Use regular expressions.
Ctrl+Shift+R to record a temporary macro
Click Replace All
Ctrl+Shift+R to stop recording the macro
From now on Ctrl+shift+P (running temporary macro)will clean the trailing whitespace.

You can get macro menu at Tools > Macros .
For more information of regular expression usage in Visual Studio 2008, please visit http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/2k3te2cs.aspx

And there is also a forum post ever discussed this issue: http://forums.asp.net/p/955596/1174934.aspx
Hope the explanations about the reason why MS doesn't make it as a built-in function make sense to you :)

If there is some reason that you can't accept this workaround, please feel free to let me know.

Thanks!

Figo Fei

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_{Monday, August 3, 2009 4:52 PM | 1 vote}

I can "kind of" see the objection to automatically truncating white space. Particularly for html and potentially other language, but I do not see a problem for the standard programming languages, (C# or VB).

I would really like to see an option, by editor, that would allow this.

Your macro worked great, I just don't think I should have to go through all that.

Thanks alot for your response. It works and I will live with that.

ScottScott